Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts

Narratives of English Canada

Eva Darias-Beautell

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781554586387
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION: Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of English Canada
• ONE: Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s
• TWO: (Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies
• THREE: 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
• FOUR: Of Aliens, Monsters, and Vampires: Speculative Fantasy’s Strategies of Dissent (Transnational Feminist Fiction)
• FIVE: The Production of Vancouver: Termination Views in the City of Glass
• SIX: Jane Rule and the Memory of Canada
• SEVEN: Confession as Antidote to Historical Truth in River Thieves
• EIGHT: Indigenous Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the 1990s: Critical Intimacy
• Contributors
• Index