L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture

by Irene Gammel (Editor), Elizabeth Rollins Epperly (Editor)

Despite the enormous popularity of her books, particularly Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery's role in the development of Canada's national culture is not often discussed by literary historians. This is curious as some of Canada's leading writers, including Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart, have acknowledged their indebtedness to Montgomery's fiction.
That scholars have not mined the 'Canadianness' of Montgomery's writing is redressed by this collection. It is the first systematic effort to investigate and explore Montgomery's active engagement with Canadian nationalism and identity, including regionalism, canon formation, and Canadian-American cultural relations. It examines her work in relation to the many dramatic changes of her day, such as the women's movement and the advent of new technologies; and it looks at the national and international consumption of Anne of Green Gables, in the form of both 'high' culture and cultural tourism.
The wide range of contributors represent views from across disciplines and boundaries, including feminist, biographical, psychoanalytical, historical, and cultural approaches. The scholarly reflections are punctuated to great effect by creative pieces, personal reflections, and interviews.
This ground-breaking collection will appeal to all fans of Montgomery's work and to students of Canadian letters. It places Montgomery and her work squarely in the mainstream of Canadian literary history, affirming her importance to our country's cultural development.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 26, 1999

About the author

Irene Gammel is a literary historian, biographer, and curator. Gammel teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture and is the Director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre.

Gammel holds a PhD (1992) and MA (1987) in English from McMaster University, and a Staatsexamen’s degree from the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany. She taught at the University of Prince Edward Island and held Visiting Professorships at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Erfurt Universität in Germany. She also served as the President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. In 2009, she was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

Reviews

[Manybooks]

Now at first glance Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s 1999 collection of essays L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture may seem both title and content wise to be rather a strange and unusual choice. For indeed (and for me also more than a bit sadly and frustratingly), while Montgomery’s most famous literary creations, while in particular the Anne of Green Gables and the Emily of New Moon series may well be must-reads for many if not for the majority of in particular Canadian girls and teenagers, L.M. Montgomery as an author has not really ever been all that included in the Canadian literary canon (with there in fact even being much active denigration, including downright nasty animosity towards Montgomery both as an author and strangely also often as a person). And indeed, when we covered Canadian literature in grade eleven English, even having me briefly mention L.M. Montgomery's name in class definitely made our teacher majorly and uncomfortably cringe. But yes, even then, even in the early 1980s, I totally did consider Lucy Maud Montgomery to be en par and equal to Canadian authors like Alice Munro, Margaret Lawrence, Margaret Atwood, Hugh McLennon, Susannah Moodie, Frederick Phillip Grove, W.O. Mitchell etc., and in retrospect I also do wish I had not simply nodded and shut my mouth when this was officially and quite vociferously poo-pooed in class, that I had spoken up and at least tried to explain why seventeen year old I wanted L.M. Montgomery featured in the literary canon of Canada, why I also did not think she was just a children's author, and that yes and in my humble opinion, Montgomery certainly had a large and palpable impact on Canadian culture and that her writing also very much and in fact like many Canadian authors often and realistically showed the historical barometer of time and place (and indeed which is precisely what the presented articles in L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture attempt to demonstrate and generally very nicely succeed in doing).

And with regard to the specifics of thematics and contents of L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, the featured articles are (all of them) happily and appreciatively organised and written by their authors in clearly structured formats that allows even a lay reader to easily follow the arguments for looking at L.M. Montgomery as a writer of enduring, of lasting literary (and cultural, historical) quality and merit (and that yes, even though all of the articles found in L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture have been penned by academics, by college and university professors, in my opinion, a potential reader does NOT EVER require in any way a university, a post secondary level education to both read and to also understand and appreciate what is being presented and penned in L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture). Five stars in general for L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture with regard to both reading pleasure and enlightenment, but lowered to four stars as I do feel that while the articles in the section on Canadian nationalism in L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture are sufficiently interesting, I also as a German immigrant to Canada think that the contributing authors have not been sufficiently critical of L.M. Montgomery with regard to her rather obvious and always on the surface tendency towards being overly and and sometimes downright scarily patriotic and pro English and as such of course Caucasian Canada. For indeed, even though I really do very much adore Montgomery as an author, her jingoism and sometimes pretty ridiculous textual bigotry towards Germans, towards French Canadians, towards First Nations, while this is of course also a sign of the times (and historical), I personally do find it majorly annoying and problematic how often this is simply just totally being accepted by critics (and even by contemporary ones, and like is kind of the case in L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture).

[Flynn O'Dacre]

“Readers of my generation, and of several generations before and since, do not think of Anne as ‘written.’ It has simply always been there.”

“He realizes, and we realize with him, that he loves his wife party because she has learned to love beauty, and beautiful language, through her immersion in Montgomery’s writing.”