by Neil Querengesser, PhD
History, literature, and the writing of the Canadian prairies is a valuable collection of ten essays that seek to reconfigure the Canadian prairie landscape by answering the question posed by its editors: “When is the Prairie?”
English professor Alison Calder and history professor Robert Wardhaugh have brought together responses to this question from a variety of theoretical approaches, including feminism, post-structuralism, and new historicism.
The introduction includes an informative overview of what have now become traditional literary and historical surveys as well as more recent works that challenge many of the assumptions of their predecessors. The current collection attempts to move beyond most of these views as well as incorporate more recent materials by taking the position that “on the plains, geography, history, and culture are inextricably linked” (p. 4) and that traditional conceptions of space and time need to be restructured in order to appreciate the implications of these links. Although the editors’ rather vague use of the terms “space” and “time” leaves something to be desired, it does not prevent the connotations of these two inextricably related terms being worked out in some insightful ways in the essays that follow.
Contributors whose first field of studies was not necessarily literary often approached the question “When is the prairie?” from illuminating perspectives, notably in the anchoring essays. Frances W. Kaye’s opening contribution interweaves the new ecologies and economies of the North American Plains with an analysis of the creative ethical and economic choices made by the protagonists of Sharon Batula’s The fourth archangel into an enlightening and stimulating geographical tapestry. The style and content of her essay radically reorient and revitalize our traditional perceptions of the plains. Historian Cam McEachern’s closing piece incorporates Alfred J. Ostheimer’s Alberta mountaineering memoirs as a classic example of early liberalism and “liberal time” into his study of the Athabasca River as a boundary of the same liberal time that defined mid-twentieth century economic development in Alberta. In between these, geographer Sarah Payne contrasts Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, Nebraska with Margaret Laurence’s Neepawa, Manitoba, drawing some interesting conclusions on the divergent aspects of literary tourism in these two locations.
Not all of the essays are immediately engaging, but most repay the reader’s effort. Claire Omhovère opens her essay on Thomas Wharton’s Icefields with almost impenetrable theoretical jargon, although she eventually achieves a lucid and enlightening discussion of deep time as represented by glacial transformations. S. Leigh Matthews makes an important case about the reconstruction of British pioneer woman immigrants in women’s memoirs. Unfortunately, the slender examples she uses buckle under the theoretical weight they are expected to support. And while Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson asserts the presence of prairie space in her study of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The cure for death by lightning, her analysis of this space is subordinated to her focus on the post-modern qualities of the text and the physical and psychological sufferings of the central character.
Two essays explore the influence of the prairie on elements of genre. In “Documents in the Postmodern Long Prairie Poem” Dennis Cooley sees the inclusion of documents as a defining feature of the prairie postmodern poem, pulled as it is between the two poles of referentiality and intertextuality. Nina van Gessel argues that Carol Shields’ The stone diaries deconstructs the traditional (male) genre of autobiography by laying bare the process and the problems inherent in creating a text in this genre, drawing some interesting parallels between it and the cracks, fissures, and convolutions of ubiquitous prairie limestone.
Both Robert Morton Brown and Debra Dudek extend the boundaries of modernism and postmodernism in different directions. Brown brilliantly reconfigures the traditional view of Kroetsch’s postmodernism, arguing that it was homegrown and first evidenced in The words of my roaring as a reaction to the myth-making aspects of William Aberhart’s prairie populism. Dudek, on the other hand, extends the boundaries of modernism into the 1970s, arguing that Lawrence’s Manawaka novels “contribute to a revisionist Canadian Literary modernism” (p. 247).
Regrettably, Aboriginal writers and scholars are conspicuous by their absence; the editors note that they received no proposals on Aboriginal texts in response to their call for papers. Many other significant aspects of prairie history, culture, and literature are absent as well, although this is not necessarily the fault of the editors. Whether the strategies employed by the current essays in this volume have furthered the possibility of new directions in prairie studies remains to be seen. Nevertheless, this book offers some insightful and creatively different ways of reweaving the fabric of prairie experience
Originally published in Canadian Ethnic Studies 37.2 (2005): 127-128.
History, literature, and the writing of the Canadian prairies
Ed. Alison Calder and Robert Wardhaugh
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005. 310 pp. $24.95 sc.
Dr. N. Querengesser is a professor of the English at Concordia University College of Alberta, Edmonton, AB
