Guerillas or Folklorists?

One of the paradoxes of Canadian culture since the intensification of globalization in the early 1990s is that the visibility of Atlantic-Canadian literature has increased as the region that produces it has become more marginalized. Economically peripheral, except as a reservoir of just-in-time labour for Alberta and Ontario, overlooked in national political campaigns and omitted from contemporary debates about multiculturalism because it does not attract immigrants, Atlantic Canada captures the attention of Central and Western Canadians primarily as a holding tank for a folkloric rural past. The popularity of the work of Wayne Johnston, David Adams Richards, Alistair MacLeod, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter and Michael Crummey is inseparable from this definition. In a book I published in 2002, entitled When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, I attempted to summarize this apparent contradiction, arguing that by the...