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.
Introduction: Laying the Groundwork: Canada's (In)visibility.- 1.The Missionary Position: The American Roots of Northrop Frye's Peaceable Kingdom.- 2. Evangeline's Revisioning: Reading Ben Farmer's Post-9/11 Evangeline: A Novel.- 3. German Internment Camps in the Maritimes: Another Untold Story in P.S. Duffy's The Cartographer of No Man's Land.- 4. Becoming Bird(ie): Exposing Canadian Government Complicity with Forced Adoptions in Christina Sunley's The Tricking of Freya.- 5. Playing The Odds: Fleeing to Canada in Stewart O'Nan's Novel.- 6. Turning Away, Going South and West: The Receding Promise of Canada in Future Home of the Living God and The Underground Railroad.- 7. The Limits of Canadian Exceptionalism: Bowling for Columbine, Come From Away, and Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up.
Jennifer Andrews is the dean, Faculty of Arts and Social sciences, and a professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University.
