Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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.
