Room of Ben’s Own

Citizenship and the Represented Child in Twentieth-Century Canadian Fiction in English

This project, a reworking of my doctoral dissertation, explores the function of child protagonists, figured as agents of social change, transition, or disruption, in twentieth-century Canadian texts in English, from mid-century onward. It focuses on specific moments in which these characters are depicted learning explicit lessons about gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, language, and nation, in the form of boundaries or taboos that surrounding adults have internalized as normal and normative. My contention is that the texts under discussion use child characters, who have not yet been fully socialized into a particular community, to explore cultural anxieties surrounding shifting perceptions of citizenship in particular historical moments for the benefit of readers who have left childhood behind. One of the most pressing concerns that I am exploring in this monograph is the ideological potential of these child protagonists, whose journeys toward adult citizenship remains malleable and ongoing. Drawing from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book asks how these texts can prompt adult readers to react to a child protagonist’s resistance or rebellion against narrow possibilities of identity, citizenship, and belonging allowed by the surrounding culture, given that adult readers are presumably unable to identify directly with a child. Among the texts included in this study are Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952), John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death (1957), Timothy Findley’s The Last of the Crazy People (1967), Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), W.O. Mitchell’s How I Spent My Summer Holidays (1981), Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994), Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), and André Alexis’s Childhood (1998).

L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Capital

This popular Canadian writer has received a staggering amount of scholarly attention in the last twenty years, fuelled in part by a series of academic conferences at the University of Prince Edward Island on Montgomery’s role in Canadian culture, popular culture, life writing, and discourses of landscape. Many of my publications about Montgomery deal with theories of adaptation and examinations of the multiple film, television, and commodification spinoffs attached to her name, but I have also published on gender/sexuality, on her subversive narrative strategies, and on “Avonlea” as a floating cultural signifier and metonym of Canadian nationhood. I recently guest-edited a double issue of the journal Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse on Reassessments of L.M. Montgomery (2004). In addition to co-chairing the L.M. Montgomery Research Group, I am presently at work on a critical edition of Montgomery’s unpublished final novel, The Blythes Are Quoted.

Ideology and Popular Literary and Cultural Texts for Young People

My research in this area centres on the implicit ideologies about normativity in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and nation embedded in fiction, films, and television programs for young people, a corpus of texts that remain underexamined in this respect. I am particularly interested in how such ideologies get included in mainstream series books, which tend to be fairly conservative in terms of the range of categorical possibilities for their characters. I’ve compiled two online bibliographies, The Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Archive and The Little House Archive, which include detailed lists of both primary and secondary materials related to these popular phenomena.