Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature by Herb Wyile (review)

Abstract

Herb Wyile. Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2011. 294 pp. $42.95 paper. When you one of best Canadian literature book titles of last several decades on your cover there is a danger that contents will not live up to it. Herb Wyile more than delivers on title's promise. This engaging and lively discussion of contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature offers far more than an explication of ideology that situates a fictional creation, world-famous girl with ginger hair, within a network of commodities that also contains Canada's favourite doughnut store chain. Simply put, Wyile's impassioned study reminds us why literature matters in neoliberal times. It matters because, as Wyile demonstrates repeatedly, literature can explore human costs of living in a time of unfettered free-market economics in subtle and creative ways that render visible moral ambiguities as well as social and material inequities. Wyile begins his introduction with contention that the Atlantic Canada of today is very much caught up in profound economic, political, cultural, and social shifts that come to be described by term 'globalization' (1). Writers from four Atlantic provinces are thus well placed to critique fallout from so-called flows of global capital (that would be flow that rushes right past your small rural community or through your region's natural resources and on to somewhere else). This is, after, all, a region that is still frequently depicted in Canadian media and, as Wyile notes, in speeches by federal ministers, as a have not, cash-sucking part of nation-state inhabited by people who ought to shut up, ship out, and get a job in Alberta oil sands. Such attitudes alone would be sufficient to inspire many creative writers to produce counter-narratives about their home places, but Atlantic Canadians must also grapple with popular images that posit their region as a leisure space for tourists and as site of Folk archetypes and Edenic bliss. In many ways, as Wyile reveals through his close reading of a staggering range of texts, these images are trickiest ones for writers to negotiate because they are, in part, self generated. The Folk haunt popular and literary culture of Atlantic Canada and form a kernel around which this book is formed. In many respects Wyile's study can be understood as a long conversation with Ian McKay's The Quest of Folk (1994), a seminal critique of Folk paradigm that has had a profound influence on contemporary field of Atlantic Canadian studies. One of achievements of Anne of Tim Hortons is that Wyile appreciates McKay's delineation of anti-modernist ideology but that he also successfully fulfils his aim of pushing against historian's tendency to frame activities associated with Folk--fishing, farming, fiddling--as either naive, ironic, or cynical (25). Rather, through his lively and careful interpretations of novels, poetry, and plays, Wyile is able to identify how fiddles and shopping malls, lobster boats, and satellite dishes can and do happily and unselfconsciously coexist (25). At times, passing of maritime or rural traditions may be elegized or satirized by writers, but iconography arising from those traditions is also questioned, contemplated, and taken seriously. Here is a body of literature, Wyile argues, that is at once cosmopolitan yet astutely engaged with expectations that it will be anything but that. The book's introduction offers a compelling synthesis of theory about neoliberalism and globalization, as well as an energetic discussion of how and why contemporary Atlantic-Canadian writers understand and contest political, economic, and cultural realities that surround them. Keeping faith with argument that region's writers are well-placed observers and sophisticated critics of ways that neoliberal economics reshape work patterns, communities, and understandings of time and place, book is organized into three sections, each with its own introduction and conclusion. …