Has Canada moved beyond the nation state into the world of the post-national? To what extent have fixed notions of Canadian nationhood been replaced by a more global, decentralized sense of identification? Is nationhood (or post-nationhood) best expressed by statelessness and exile or by belonging? Or can Canadian national identity in fact fruitfully coexist with the post-national consciousness? These are some of the issues covered by this volume, issues seen from a range of perspectives literary, cultural, political and economic. In the literary sphere the national/post-national debate is explored both through canonical writers, such as L. M. Montgomery, Stephen Leacock, and Marie-Claire Blais, and through recent First Nations, Asian-Canadian, African-Canadian, Ukrainian-Canadian and Quebec writing. The political and economic range is equally diverse, covering such topics as immigration policy, multiculturalism, Canadian-American relations, tourist imaginings of the Canadian North, the Canadian city, and Quebec nationalism. The book brings together 27 original articles from international scholars and creative writers, offering both European and Canadian perspectives. Six articles in French focus specifically on the francophone sphere.

Autorentext

The Editors: Gunilla Florby is Professor of English Literature at Gothenburg University, Göteborg, Sweden. Her research interests are Renaissance drama and poetry, postmodernist and postcolonial theory, and contemporary North American writers. Her publications on Canadian fiction include a study of Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch.
Mark Shackleton is currently University Lecturer and Docent at the Department of English, University of Helsinki, and is Director of the University of Helsinki project «Cross-Cultural Contacts: Diaspora Writing in English». He has published widely on postcolonial writing, particularly on Native North American writers.
Katri Suhonen is currently Lecturer at the Département d'études françaises, Concordia University (Montreal). She works on French Canadian contemporary literature and has recently published an essay on masculine identity in Quebec women's writing. Her current research projects analyse the symbolism of winter in the Quebec novel and the mechanisms of coherence in the prose of Marie-Claire Blais.

Inhalt

Contents: Gunilla Florby/Mark Shackleton/Katri Suhonen: Introduction. Canada: Images of a Post/National Society - Shauna Wilton: Immigration Policy and Literature. Contradictions of a «Post-National» State? - Michael Keefer: Resisting the Post-National. Canadian Critiques of the Geo/Cultural/Politics of Globalization - David G. Haglund/Joseph T. Jockel: The Non-Vanishing Border. Change and Continuity in Canadian-American Relations - Alain A. Grenier : Tourisme et nostalgie pour une espèce menacée qu'on appelle le Nord - John Robinson: The Post/National Society and the Canadian Economy - Harvey Schwartz: Canada's Largest City in a Post-National Society - Carole Gerson: Imprint and the Nation. The History of English-Canadian Publishing through the Lens of L. M. Montgomery - David Staines: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in the Continuum of Canadian Literature - Katri Suhonen : Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel ou l'hiver de la société et de la littérature québécoises - Janne Korkka: Engaging the Other in Rudy Wiebe's Early Writing. Peace Shall Destroy Many and First and Vital Candle - Albert-Reiner Glaap: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Plays by Jewish Writers - Eve Irène Therrien : L'absence du corps et la présence des images. Le principe de réduction chez Denis Marleau - Janice Kulyk Keefer: Images of a Ghost-National Society. Pumpkins, Orange Tents, and Chornobyl Coiffure - Gunilla Florby: M. G. Vassanji and the Post-National Predicament - Elisabeth Mårald: The Young Generation's Images of Canada in Novels by Carol Shields, Thomas King, and Eva Hoffman - Úlfar Bragason: Images of North America in Writings by Three Icelandic Authors. Matthías Jochumsson, Jón Ólafsson, and Einar H. Kvaran - Maria Walecka-Garbalinska : Le Canada et les représentations du Nord dans l'oeuvre de Xavier Marmier (1808-1892). Substitutions et parallèles - George Elliott Clarke: Strategies for Legitimizing Difference. Mixed-Race Resistance in the Works of Andrea Thompson and Lorena Gale, Two African-Canadian Writers - Britta Olinder: Images of Canada in a Post-National Perspective. Janice Kulyk Keefer's «The Waste Zone» - Ruta slapkauskaite: The (Post/National) Body as a Carnivalized Historiographer in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers - Mark Shackleton: Tomson Highway's Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout. Imagining the Post-National Society - Markus M. Müller: «All this water imagery must mean something». On the Fluctuating State of Nations in Suzette Mayr's The Widows and Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water - Gurli Woods: Larissa Lai's Novel When Fox Is a Thousand. Images of a «Post» Society - Voichita-Maria Sasu : D'une tribu à l'autre : François Barcelo - Marlene Broemer: Duelling Chronotopes. Pre-Colonial and Postmodern/Post-Colonial Time and Space in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost - Susan M. Murphy : Hypatie ou la fin des dieux de Jean Marcel et le post/nationalisme ? - Susan Gold/Smith: Images of a Post/National Society. Nobel Flags of Peace Project 2005.