Gained Ground: Perspectives on Canadian and Comparative North American Studies ed. by Eva Gruber and Caroline Rosenthal (review)

Gained Ground is the sequel over thirty years later to Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature, co-edited by Robert Kroetsch and Reingard M. Nischik. How the ground has shifted since that pioneering work is superbly demonstrated in this festschrift for Nischik, 'Reingard, Queen of the Night', as Margaret Atwood's cartoon wittily addresses the doyenne of European Canadian literary studies in English. The agenda of this volume is very different from the earlier one, for the context has changed from a single focus on Canada to a more comprehensive view of Canadian literature and culture in a comparative North American Studies framework, following Nischik's evolution as a critic, and mirroring a general shift in academia beyond national borders towards transnational, comparative, and hemispheric perspectives. With its 11 articles by European and Canadian scholars plus a coda paying tribute to Nischik, it signals these new directions.

Structured into four sections, it emphasises a comparative North American Studies approach while demonstrating the continuing importance of nation-based perspectives on which comparative work depends. Indeed, apart from Bettina Mack's persuasive opening argument for 'Mapping North America: Comparative North American Literature and Its Contexts', the comparative articles are outnumbered by in-depth studies of Canadian texts, suggesting the flexibility of this model. What I find most remarkable about the collection is its range of authors, genres, and critical methodologies. Canadian case studies include two on the traditional topic of landscape, but with Claire Omhovère's phenomenological reading of postmodern ways of envisaging western landscape in Robert Kroetsch's poetry and Mark Jarman's stories, conventional pictorial representation dissolves into sensations of sound, while in Katya Sarkowsky's '"Landscapes-of-the Heart": Transgenerational Memory and Relationality in Roy Kiyooka's Mothertalk', Japanese and Canadian landscapes become subjective reference points in a 'transnational and transgenerational dialogue which exceeds its Canadian context' (p. 94). In Sherrill Grace's reading of Timothy Findley's story 'Stones', stones become 'touchstones' to memory and storytelling. There are also two fascinating articles on Atwood, who has long been the focus of Nischik's research: Julia Breitbach's study of photographic discourse in 'The Door' and the MaddAddam trilogy, as Atwood shifts from still photography to digital technology, and Shuli Barzilai's scholarly analysis of intertextuality in Atwood's poem 'Stealing the Hummingbird Cup', written after her visit to the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.

Turning to the comparative North American Studies model, we see the advantages of double vision with its power to generate new insights – in Marlene Goldman's pairing of Alice Munro with American lesbian graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, both concerned with the 'theatrical re-staging of traumatic shame' (p. 109) in relation to gender identity, and in Michael and Linda Hutcheon's contrastive analysis of heroism in two historical operas, Dr Atomic (featuring J. Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atom bomb) and Louis Riel. One celebrates American individualism and triumphalism, while the other focuses on the figure who best personifies Canada's fractious history.

The end frame here is Aritha van Herk's imaginative re-staging of the original Nischik–Kroetsch project filtered through her 2017 interview with Nischik, a splendid compliment to European–Canadian collaboration in this groundbreaking collection.