Description
Book SynopsisA captivating look at how recent Canadian fiction, film, and television appropriate and redefine American genres.
Trade Review"The author makes an engaging, cross-disciplinary, cross-genre, cross-cultural argument for the importance and interaction of the border genre, the road genre, and the American western (as a concept and construct) in cultural production in Canada. An extremely ambitious and innovative study." Jane M. Koustas, Brock University and author of Robert Lepage on the Toronto Stage
"Katherine Ann Roberts applies this practice [of North American cultural criticism] to a manageably large set of close readings of Canadian and American literature, television, and film. The interpretations are diligently explanatory. Roberts' chosen texts are not merely representations of a trans/national situation; they are also examples of genres evolving transnationally from American models that are economically incentivized (thus inevitable) but also subject to critique. West/Border/Road is a welcome and significant addition to the scholarly body of work that Roberts synthesizes and expands." Canadian Literature
"Through her nuanced awareness of the complexities of an asymmetrical relation between US and Canadian culture, Roberts goes beyond the few existing previous studies of the Western genre in Canada that worked largely contrastively and dismissed US culture as un- Canadian. Roberts begins to show that the engagement with US genres in Canadian culture, as in Vanderhaeghe's works, goes beyond a parodic rejection and warrants a more careful examination." Western American Literature
