1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910783762503321

Autore

Hulan Renée

Titolo

Northern experience and the myths of Canadian culture [[electronic resource] /] / Renée Hulan

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Montréal ; ; Ithaca, : McGill-Queen's University Press, c2002

ISBN

1-282-85945-5

9786612859458

0-7735-6944-8

Descrizione fisica

245 p. ; ; 24 cm

Collana

McGill-Queen's native and northern series ; ; 29

Disciplina

C810.9/32719

Soggetti

Canadian literature - History and criticism

National characteristics, Canadian, in literature

Inuit in literature

Myth in literature

Canada, Northern In literature

Arctic regions In literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [201]-234) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments ix -- Introduction: A Northern Nation? 3 -- 1. Speaking Man to Man: Ethnography and the Representation of the North 29 -- 2. "Everybody Likes the Inuit": Inuit Revision and Representations of the North 60 -- 3. "To Fight, Defeat, and Dominate": From Adventure to Mastery 98 -- 4. Lovers and Strangers: Reimagining the Mythic North 138 -- Epilogue: Unsettling the Northern Nation 179.

Sommario/riassunto

By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depicts northern peoples and places, Hulan provides a descriptive account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan



maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance, and that these characteristics are evoked to justify the nationhood of the Canadian state.