Fashioning the Canadian Landscape: Essays on Travel Writing, Tourism, and National Identity in the Pre-Automobile Era

Description

Interpretations of Canada's emerging identity have been largely based on a relatively small corpus of literary writing and landscape paintings, overlooking the influence of the British and American travel writers who published hundreds of books and articles that did much to fix the image of Canada in the popular imagination. In Fashioning the Canadian Landscape, J.I. Little examines how Canada, much like the United States, came to be identified with its natural landscape. Little argues that in contrast to the American identification with the wilderness sublime, however, Canada’s image was strongly influenced by the picturesque convention favoured by British travel writers. This amply illustrated volume includes chapters ranging from Labrador to British Columbia, some of which focus on such notable British authors as Rupert Brooke and Rudyard Kipling, and others on talented American writers such as Charles Dudley Warner. Based not only on the views of the landscape but on the racist descriptions of the Indigenous peoples and the romanticization of the Canadian ‘folk’, Little argues that the national image that emerged was colonialist as well as colonial in nature. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction 1 “Like a fragment of the old world”: The Historical Regression of Quebec City in Travel Narratives and Tourist Guidebooks, 1776–1913 2 Canadian Pastoral: Promotional Images of British Colonization in Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships during the 1830s 3 West Coast Picturesque: Class, Gender, and Race in a British Colonial Landscape, 1858–1871 4 Scenic Tourism on a Canadian-American Borderland: Lake Memphremagog’s Steamboat Excursions and Resort Hotels, 1850–1900 5 Seeing Elemental Nature: An American Transcendentalist On and Off the Coast of Labrador, 1864–1865 6 Travels in a Cold and Rugged Land: C.H. Farnham’s Quebec Essays in Harper’s Magazine, 1883–1889 7 “A fine, hardy, good-looking race of people”: Travel Writers, Tourism Promoters, and the Highland Scots Identity on Cape Breton Island, 1829–1920 8 Picturing a National Landscape: Images of Nature in Picturesque Canada 9 Our Lady of the Snows: Rudyard Kipling’s Imperialist Vision of Canada 10 A Country without a Soul: Rupert Brooke’s Gothic Vision of Canada Afterword: An Unknown Country? Credits Bibliography