“It Was a Strange New World, It Was”: Queering Place and Place Myths in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador Literature

Abstract

This article begins with an analytical itemization of several moments in recent Newfoundland and Labrador fictions in which identity, culture, and history are presented and romanticized through heteronormative sexual relationships and metaphors. Having identified such depictions as established tropes in Newfoundland and Labrador literature, this article then considers a new wave of queer representations of Newfoundland place and people in novels and stories by Jessica Grant, Kathleen Winter, Eva Crocker, Michael Winter, and others to examine how these instances contradict and complicate heteronormative images of consummation and control. Finally, this article will accept the invitation extended by Scott Lauria Morgensen in “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities” to consider how queer histories can be consumed by settler nationalism and then question if these new Newfoundland narratives are unsettling and transformative or simply more stories supporting the complexity, as well as the inevitability and finality, of an Indigenized Newfoundland settler culture.