“What’s in a Name? Towards a Theory of the Anne Brand.” In Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables, edited by Irene Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre, 192–211. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
This chapter borrows from the work of past scholars who have examined the cultural industries that expand and export L.M. Montgomery’s work and name to geopolitical contexts all over the globe in order to focus on the brand power of “Anne Shirley.” Aspects of Montgomery’s legacy over which she had no control literally came to life in 1934, when actor Dawn Paris took the name Anne Shirley as her stage name as part of her attempt to reinvent herself as a Hollywood star. The critical and commercial success of the film version of Anne of Green Gables led to a sequence of early Hollywood film texts whose only relationship to Montgomery’s work is through the name and image of Anne Shirley. The inability of either Montgomery or Paris to exert control over the name or the identity anticipated the contested ownership of the Anne brand in the twenty-first century.
“‘The Same as Bein’ Canadian’: John Marlyn’s Eye among the Blind.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 34, no. 1 (2009): 22–40.
This paper investigates the role a child protagonist placed in a setting of suffering and injustice can play in the construction and performance of cultural citizenship in Canada, with particular attention to the ways that confirming or resisting the values of the status quo becomes linked with a young protagonist’s coming of age. In John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death (1957), Sandor Hunyadi defines himself not within his own Hungarian community but in relation to “the English,” a term used interchangeably to signify a language, a class, an ethnicity, a nation, and an identity. But because the novel calls into question his desire to assimilate to such a narrow view of Canadian citizenship, he becomes an ironic “eye among the blind” in the citizenship debates that have persisted across the history of the nation.
“Agency, Belonging, Citizenship: The ABCs of Nation-Building in Contemporary Canadian Texts for Adolescents.” Special issue: Canada and Its Discontents. Canadian Literature 198 (Autumn 2008): 91–101.
This paper pinpoints the ways in which discourses of agency, belonging, and citizenship are staged in a handful of Canadian texts for adolescents published in the last twenty-five years: Beatrice Culleton’s April Raintree (1984), Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Harriet’s Daughter (1988), Deborah Ellis’s Parvana’s Journey (2002), Glen Huser’s Stitches (2003), and Martine Leavitt’s Heck Superhero (2004). These novels depict young people who are marginalized due to oppressive discourses such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, poverty, and the dissolution of the nuclear family, and thus lack the support systems of the status quo. At the same time, they appear to broach larger questions about the construction of the Canadian nation alongside the story of a central protagonist’s growth from relative immaturity to relative maturity. Undercutting the dominant fantasy of a liberal and diverse nation-state, these narratives refuse to resolve or settle oppressive discourses that conflict with official policies of multiculturalism, keeping the ideal nation in sight but out of reach.
“The Fitness of Things: Anne of Green Gables, Social Change, and L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Discerning Extraordinary Observer.’” In Diversity and Change in Early Canadian Women’s Writing, edited by Jennifer Chambers, 170–93. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
This chapter recovers an optional reading strategy built into L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, an alternative to the reading of the novel as a narrative of acculturation for child readers (particularly girls). It emphasizes Anne’s potential as an agent of social change, one who disrupts normative values that surrounding adults adhere to as she evolves from a pre-socialized child to a conventional (and consequently much less interesting) young woman. Using Montgomery’s journals as an intertext, the chapter considers some of the reasons for the novel’s enduring popularity across diverse reading audiences, particularly given the double-edged resolution in which Anne renounces her ambitions for the sake of the domestic sphere while gaining more agency than Montgomery herself had during the period of the novel’s composition.
“‘That Abominable War!’: The Blythes Are Quoted and Thoughts on L.M. Montgomery’s Late Style.” In Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, 109–30. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
This chapter examines L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered final project, The Blythes Are Quoted, now part of an archival repository at the University of Guelph. It considers the ways in which Montgomery’s anxieties about war and the future are woven into her final cycle of stories, which she mixed together with forty-one of her poems once she was no longer able to write in the journal she was preserving for posthumous publication. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion of “late style,” a form of reconsideration that he suggests occurs near the end of all lives, the chapter considers the ways in which this final typescript provides evidence of Montgomery’s reevaluation of her medium and her message as the storms of the Second World War raged on.
“Adolescence through the Looking-Glass: Ideology and the Represented Child in Degrassi: The Next Generation.” Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 33, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 82–106.
Drawing on British theories of representation as well as on Canadian, American, and Australian studies of adolescent problem fiction, this paper discusses the complex system of representation at work in the television series Degrassi: The Next Generation, an adolescent soap opera in which episodes approach topical issues through good storytelling and a range of appealing characters for adolescent viewers to identify with. By focusing on two extended storylines dealing with abortion and gay male sexuality, the paper investigates how the series produces and circulates a range of subject positions for adolescent viewers to consider.
Recipient of the Graduate Student Essay Award, Children’s Literature Association (USA) (2006).
«L’abandon du Grand Récit : réflexion sur la révision de l’identité québécoise dans le dernier tome du roman Les Filles de Caleb». Numéro spécial : Francophonie, diversité, écriture(s): les enjeux, les défis, les possibles, sous la direction de Maroussia Ahmed et Madeleine Jeay. Voix plurielles 3, no. 1 (mai 2006). (Texte intégral)
Le présent article retrace les changements abordés dans le dernier volet du roman Les Filles de Caleb d’Arlette Cousture, un récit que plusieurs lecteurs/lectrices et téléspectateurs/téléspectatrices ont reçu comme une tranche de leur Histoire nationale québécoise commune. En se penchant sur le statut de la femme, l’effondrement du pouvoir de l’Église catholique, la redéfinition du cadre familial et l’élargissement des possibilités identitaires au Québec dans les années frôlant la Révolution tranquille, l’article met en relief la révision au «Grand Récit» que ce dernier volet, L’abandon de la mésange (2003), offre à son lectorat francophone.
“‘A Small World After All’: L.M. Montgomery’s Imagined Avonlea as Virtual Landscape.” In The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, edited by Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Peter Trifonas, 1121–40. Springer International Handbooks of Education 14. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2006.
Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “simulacrum,” this chapter proposes that L.M. Montgomery’s imagined community of Avonlea, ostensibly based on her own experience in Prince Edward Island at the turn of the twentieth century, is in fact a selective representation of reality, one that avoids cultural and historical specificity in order to make this imagined space highly appealing to readers who had never even heard of Prince Edward Island. By examining her bestselling novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), in the context of more recent adaptations and spin-off products, this chapter strives to ascertain how Montgomery’s fiction proved so universally malleable in the first place. While Montgomery’s creative choices are directly responsible for the books’ international relevance and popularity, this selective representation has a downfall when read as metonymically representing the nation.
“Pigsties and Sunsets: L.M. Montgomery, A Tangled Web, and a Modernism of Her Own.” English Studies in Canada 31, no. 4 (December 2005): 123–46. (Full text)
This paper reconsiders whether L.M. Montgomery, author of two dozen novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, rejected modernism, an assumption that continues to be made by both her supporters and her detractors. By reading her experimental novel A Tangled Web (1931) through the lens of feminist challenges to limited definitions of modernism, the paper examines the novel’s innovations to structure, narration, and subject matter in the context of Montgomery’s responses to evolving trends in the fiction of this period.
“From Bad Boy to Dead Boy: Homophobia, Adolescent Problem Fiction, and Male Bodies that Matter.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 288–313.
Drawing on the theories of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Mieke Bal, this paper examines two Canadian young adult novels—Diana Wieler’s Bad Boy (1989) and Brian Payton’s Hail Mary Corner (2001)—in which a gay male supporting character is used as a catalyst for a heterosexual protagonist’s gendered development. Although both straight heroes earn growth and forgiveness in what appear to be “satisfying” resolutions, the gay friends they reject remain trapped within a discourse of homophobia that is not adequately overturned. The ritualized rejection of the gay male body thus becomes a regulatory practice, not only for the supporting characters but potentially for the adolescent readers that these texts address.
Reprinted in Children’s Literature Review 119, edited by Tom Burns, 137–53. Detroit: Gale Group, 2007.
“Toward Further Dialogue: A Bibliography on Improvisation.” Jointly with Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble. In The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 397–416. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
This bibliography brings together diverse discourses and resources in which improvisation figures, with particular emphasis on references to a range of ethnic and national improvisatory practices in music, dance, pedagogy, and the literary arts, in the hope that these materials will help prompt further research and study of improvisatory discourses.
“Road to Avonlea: A Co-Production of the Disney Corporation.” In Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, edited by Irene Gammel, 174–85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
This chapter draws on American cultural theories to investigate the involvement of the Disney Corporation, an American conglomerate known for its subtle patterns of cultural domination, in the creation of the television series Road to Avonlea, both a “Canadian” popular culture phenomenon and an international televisual export. While this “family” series borrows from Disney’s patterns of innocence in its depiction of time and place, it nevertheless resists conforming to a narrow range of possibilities by focusing on alternative family structures, thus making the series both progressive and conservative simultaneously.
“Stand by Your Man: Adapting L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.” Special issue: Literatures, Cinemas, Cultures, edited by Peter Dickinson. Essays on Canadian Writing 76 (Spring 2002): 149–69.
This essay investigates the ways in which the film and television adaptations of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables have eclipsed the very source text from which they are derived. Through an intertextual reading of two key films—a 1934 “talkie” from RKO Radio Pictures and Sullivan Entertainment’s 1985 television miniseries—the paper strives to discover how the films’ misunderstanding of the book’s satire and subversive messages works for viewers who have not read Montgomery’s text.
“L.M. Montgomery: An Annotated Filmography.” Special issue: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture II. Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 99 (Fall 2000): 43–73. (Revised and expanded edition)
From the multiple film and television versions of Anne of Green Gables to the weekly television series Road to Avonlea and Emily of New Moon, the numerous televisual adaptations of the work of L.M. Montgomery have enjoyed unprecedented popularity with viewers around the world while sometimes remaining enormously controversial to readers of her work. This annotated list of these productions is designed to aid scholars, readers, and viewers in their understanding of this ongoing phenomenon.
“‘Waging the War’: The Religious Right’s Obsession with Homosexuality.” Journal of Religion and Culture 13 (1999): 109–23.
This paper examines a political, religious, and legal quagmire that became a site of multiple tensions in late-twentieth-century North American cultures: the Religious Right’s obsession with the so-called “homosexual lifestyle.” From a series of ads in prominent American newspapers persuading gay people either to convert to heterosexuality or choose celibacy to the “outing” of a purple Teletubby, these interventions in popular media coincided with legal shifts in Canada (particularly Québec) that sought to eliminate heterosexist double standards in the definition of “common-law spouse.” This paper traces some of the contentious debates about this social issue, from Biblical reinterpretation and liberation theology to “nature versus nurture” and the validity of “sexual reorientation,” responding to the work of such social scientists and theologians as Sara Diamond, Richard D. Mohr, Eric Marcus, Mary E. Hunt, and Rosemary Radford Ruether.
“Walter’s Closet.” Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 94 (Summer 1999): 7–20.
This paper argues that the life and death of Walter Blythe at the centre of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside are completely atypical within the boundaries of the Bildüngsroman for which Montgomery’s work is renowned. Instead of representing Prince Edward Island as an Edenic concept of home and family, here Montgomery employs the imagery of the Island to symbolize the physical safety, the emotional security, and the sexual innocence of a character who is always seen as “different” in ways that are often associated with the homosexual closet.
Recipient of the MacGuigan Prize for best undergraduate essay on an aspect of English literature since 1700, Concordia University (1999).
Reprinted in Children’s Literature Review 91, edited by Scot Peacock, 184–93. Detroit: Gale Group, 2004.