Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts

This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of
narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes
as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the
supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for
official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of
metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for
and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to
the present.

In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers
have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile
and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative
perspectives such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism,
feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that the artistic and
cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first
century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement of the images
constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their
readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their
selected methodological tools, the authors offer a tapestry of alternative
approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly
Penelopiad, their unravelling readings self-consciously interrogating Canada’s
(lack of) ghosts.