Unsettled Remains

Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic

Cynthia Sugars, Gerry Turcotte, Cynthia Sugars, Gerry Turcotte

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781554582945
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic examines how Canadian writers have combined a postcolonial awareness with gothic metaphors of monstrosity and haunting in their response to Canadian history. The essays gathered here range from treatments of early postcolonial gothic expression in Canadian literature to attempts to define a Canadian postcolonial gothic mode. Many of these texts wrestle with Canada's colonial past and with the voices and histories that were repressed in the push for national consolidation but emerge now as uncanny reminders of that contentious history. The haunting effect can be unsettling and enabling at the same time.

In recent years, many Canadian authors have turned to the gothic to challenge dominant literary, political, and social narratives. In Canadian literature, the "postcolonial gothic" has been put to multiple uses, above all to figure experiences of ambivalence that have emerged from a colonial context and persisted into the present. As these essays demonstrate, formulations of a Canadian postcolonial gothic differ radically from one another, depending on the social and cultural positioning of who is positing it. Given the preponderance, in colonial discourse, of accounts that demonize otherness, it is not surprising that many minority writers have avoided gothic metaphors. In recent years, however, minority authors have shown an interest in the gothic, signalling an emerging critical discourse. This "spectral turn" sees minority writers reversing long-standing characterizations of their identity as "monstrous" or invisible in order to show their connections to and disconnection from stories of the nation.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic
• CHAPTER ONE: Catholic Gothic: Atavism, Orientalism, and Generic Change in Charles De Guise’s Le Cap au diable
• CHAPTER TWO: Viking Graves Revisited: Pre-Colonial Primitivism in Farley Mowat’s Northern Gothic
• CHAPTER THREE: Coyote’s Children and the Canadian Gothic: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning
• CHAPTER FOUR: “Horror Written on Their Skin”: Joy Kogawa’s Gothic Uncanny
• CHAPTER FIVE: Familiar Ghosts: Feminist Postcolonial Gothic in Canada
• CHAPTER SIX: Canadian Gothic and the Work of Ghosting in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees
• CHAPTER SEVEN: A Ukrainian-Canadian Gothic?: Ethnic Angst in Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Green Library
• CHAPTER EIGHT: “Something not unlike enjoyment”: Gothicism, Catholicism, and Sexuality in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen
• CHAPTER NINE: Rethinking the Canadian Gothic: Reading Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
• CHAPTER TEN: Beothuk Gothic: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Keeping the Gothic at (Sick) Bay: Reading the Transferences in Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX