The range of texts she studies, as well as the variety of topics covered in the seven comprehensive chapters, result in a thoroughly researched and deeply thought-out text that covers all available ...bases when discussing the gothic form in relation to Canada's unique cultural and transnational positions, as well as Canadian history and the identities borne out of it. While less well-read readers may struggle in parts with Sugars's digressions in the form of close textual readings and her sporadic use of extracts and quotations when discussing her chosen works in greater detail, this momentary confusion does not detract from Sugars's arguments. ...her writing style allows the reader to slip past the works with which he or she may be less familiar and instead focus on the concepts that she presents, with her transference of traditional gothic language to the Canadian literary tradition allowing them to be applied to a multitude of Canadian works as the reader chooses. Ultimately, Sugars's Canadian Gothic is very much a product of love's labour, and this transfers with great effect to her language and writing style - it's hard for the reader not to become engrossed in the prose, even when encountering unheard of works, and Sugars's new ideas and excavation of a traditional genre, from within an unexamined national literature.
Long dismissed as a “critical error” ( Booth 2016 ) and still capable of inciting “embarrassment palpable” ( Watson 2006 ) among scholars otherwise happy to emphasize the material contexts that ...inform the circulation of texts, literary tourism has recently become the focus of serious academic inquiry. Recent work has begun to disaggregate the various forms of literary tourist sites ( Fawcett and Cormack 2001 ), but continues to have a methodological gap surrounding the specifically literary aspects of the practice itself, and—with the notable exception of Green Gables (Squire 1992; Devereux 2001 )—has left Canada predictably unexamined. This essay begins with a brief introduction to literary tourism in Canada before moving into a comparative analysis of two National Historic Sites associated with Canadian literary authors: the Robert Service cabin in Dawson City, Yukon, and the John McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario. The sites offer a compelling comparison as the former homes of two of the best-known Canadian poets of the early twentieth century whose works have become popularly synonymous with two of Canada’s most heavily mythologized eras. The enduring popularity of poems like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” reflect not only Service’s central role in mythologizing Canada’s north but also a strategic “cultural commoditization” of the area’s gold rush heritage ( Jarvenpa 1994 ; Grace 2001 ), while McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” retains its status not only as the “most popular poem” of the First World War in Canada and beyond ( Fussell 2000 ), but also as a primary example of the ideological function of Great War literature within Canada ( Holmes 2005 ; Gordon 2014 ). Although the two author houses may initially appear a study in contrasts, I draw on recent work in literary tourist studies to argue they are linked in their function as “materialized fictions” ( Hendrix 2008 ), or concrete interpretative frames that aim to offer tangible evidence of the Canadian myths their former inhabitants helped to fashion.
The article engages with the cultural impact of John McCrae’s canonical poem “In Flanders Fields” (1915), and more specifically the permutations of cultural memory and heritage discourse in
, edited ...by Amanda Betts and published in 2015. It shows how thirteen Canadians explore the revolutionary role of the poem in Canadian collective and individual memory, as well as its omissions and misrepresentations. The article juxtaposes the cultural history of the poem with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and its contemporary transformations, also showing how selected essays in the collection bridge the First World War with other armed conflicts. Applying Ann Rigney’s terminology, the article approaches the poem as a textual monument, demonstrating how “In Flanders Fields” has evolved from the role of a
in Canadian cultural memory, providing a cultural frame for later recollections, to that of a
, becoming a benchmark for critical reflection on dominant memorial practices.
On the state level, at the North Carolina Museum of History, the first realization was that like most of the public today, few staffmembers on the exhibition team knew anything about World War I, of ...its causes, the battles, the American role, or of its lasting impact. The goal of raising public awareness and appreciation for the World War I generation had to begin by promoting an understanding of the war with the very team of professionals who were responsible for creating a major exhibition on North Carolina's role in the war. The little boy looked up at his father and asked: "When are we going to have World War III?" Editor's Note Readers familial with ELT know that over the years we have published many articles and book reviews on authors and subjects related to World War I, such as Jonathan Cranfield's "The Submarine in British Periodicals and Fiction, 1901-1914: ...Printing by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History in 2015.
This essay explores the ways in which John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields' sought to rhetorically build community, how it became the poem of both the army and of the civilians at home, and how it ...solicited responses from across the boundaries of combatants and non-combatants, male and female, and young and old. By engaging with wartime and post-war responses, including L. M. Montgomery's home front novel Rilla of Ingleside (1921), this discussion suggests that the practices of recitation and the composition of derivative or responsive works constitute a performative collaboration that the poem itself invites, which allows the poem to be reimagined and repurposed to new ends in new eras. By drawing on rhetorical theories, and by closely considering the poem's composition and publication history, a new understanding of this poem emerges, one that draws attention to the function of war poetry as a social text that both emanates from and shapes its culture, with the capacity to mobilize readers and audiences across boundaries of gender, age and nation. Ultimately, this essay recognizes the rhetorical function of poetry in changing individual and collective consciousness, highlighting the way that rhetoric and poetry are entwined in acts of response and collaboration.
The Erotic Wounds of War Rekdal, Paisley
New England review (1990),
12/2018, Letnik:
39, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Rekdal discusses the complex roles that sex, physical beauty, and the erotic play in the literary imagination of soldiers and war. In elegies, and in poems of war, the short cycle of bloom and decay ...symbolized by flowers naturally echoes how we feel about the loss of the young, and though today some may associate flowers primarily with femininity, that is not only how poets have seen this connection between human youth and springtime bloom, especially when so many boys--due to illness and accident, and also due to war--died young.
Editor's Notes Mathey, Éva
Hungarian journal of English and American studies,
04/2018, Letnik:
24, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Faithful to its academic mission the current issue of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies presents outstanding Hungarian and international contributions which cover a variety of ...scholarship ranging from topics in British art and poetry, the theory and literary representations of urban spaces and identities, Canadian federalism, science fiction, and language policy to Cold War studies, Hungarian-American relations, as well as film studies. With the two essays which inaugurate the issue HJEAS joins the commemoration, thus the academic discourse on the memory of World War I. Eszter Edit Balogh's "From Heroic Soldiers to Geometric Forms and Suffering Wrecks: The Transformation of the Male Body in the Art of World War I" offers an engaging study of how mechanized, modern warfare and its experience generated a shift in the formerly hegemonic, traditional representational modes of war in general and the masculine ideal in particular in art, giving way to innovative artistic strategies and thus shaping the Modernist discourse on masculinity. Applying the conventional classification schemes and the analytical framework developed by Richard Ruiz and Terrence G. Wiley, Czeglédi's fine-tuned analysis of the linguistic data concludes that the English language did not yet serve as a "symbolic and endangered component of American identity at the end of the 18th century," the relative degree of ethnolinguistic diversity was viewed as a resource, and "the 'English-only' strain and the surge of linguistic nativism were still beyond the language policy horizon." "1 Drawing on an extensive body of recently declassified archival material, the essay sheds light on the "significance of a possible return" against the background of the normalization of bilateral relations between the United States and Hungary and gives due attention and recognition to the event in the history writing of the Cold War.
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