Canada Through American Eyes: Literature and Canadian Exceptionalism

ISBN-13: 9783031221194 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Jennifer Andrews

Opis

This book explores how Canada is imagined primarily by US writers, and what readers and scholars on both sides of the Canada-US border can learn from these recent depictions by examining a selection of US-authored fiction from 9/11 to the present. The novels — and occasionally paintings, films, and musicals — that are the subject of the book provide a deliberately varied set of case studies to probe how US texts, along with works of art produced on both sides of the Canada-US border, uncover moments in Canadian historical and literary studies that have been buried or occluded to protect Canada's self-representation as an exceptional nation. 

Spis treści

Introduction: Laying the Groundwork: Canada’s (In)visibility.

Chapter 1: The Missionary Position: The American Roots of Northrop Frye’s Peaceable Kingdom.

Chapter 2: Evangeline’s Revisioning: Reading Ben Farmer’s Post-9/11 Evangeline: A Novel. 

Chapter 3: German Internment Camps in the Maritimes: Another Untold Story in P.S. Duffy’s The Cartographer of No Man’s Land.

Chapter 4: Becoming Bird(ie): Exposing Canadian Government Complicity with Forced Adoptions in Christina Sunley’s The Tricking of Freya.

Chapter 5: Playing The Odds: Fleeing to Canada in Stewart O’Nan’s Novel.

Chapter 6: Turning Away, Going South and West: The Receding Promise of Canada in Future Home of the Living God and The Underground Railroad.

Chapter 7: The Limits of Canadian Exceptionalism: Bowling for Columbine, Come From Away, and Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up.

O autorze

Jennifer Andrews is the dean, Faculty of Arts and Social sciences, and a professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. 

Blurb

This book explores how Canada is imagined primarily by US writers, and what readers and scholars on both sides of the Canada-US border can learn from these recent depictions by examining a selection of US-authored fiction from 9/11 to the present. The novels — and occasionally paintings, films, and musicals — that are the subject of the book provide a deliberately varied set of case studies to probe how US texts, along with works of art produced on both sides of the Canada-US border, uncover moments in Canadian historical and literary studies that have been buried or occluded to protect Canada's self-representation as an exceptional nation.

Jennifer Andrews is the dean, Faculty of Arts and Social sciences, and a professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University.