Refiguring Identitites: Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, and: Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Refiguring Identitites: Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction, and: Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History Christl Verduyn Coral Ann Howells. Refiguring Identitites: Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003. 230 pp. $59.95 cloth. Coral Ann Howells, ed. Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 266 pp. $81.00 cloth. Two new books by Coral Ann Howells make welcome additions to the international scholarship on Canadian literature that has grown in leaps and bounds alongside the burgeoning international readership of Canada's writers. A well-known and respected literary critic, Howells has written extensively on Canadian literature, in particular on women writers and most notably on Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. In Refiguring Identities: Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, Howells turns her critical eye to the work of a younger generation of writers, while in Where Are the Voices Coming From?: Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History, she extends her editorial interests to Canadian film as well as Canadian literature. In both books, Howells draws on the theoretical frameworks of feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism with the dexterity, insight, and nuance of an experienced and well-read critic. Readers and students of Canadian literature everywhere will find these two publications useful. In her Introduction to Refiguring Identities, Howells recognizes the significant change in Canada's literary profile since the early 1990s, forged by the increased number of Canadian writers of diverse, non-European ethnic and racial backgrounds. Her interest lies in how this has changed the concept of Canadianness and refigures the perennial Canadian question of national identity. Taking up her position as "a reader and critic working outside Canada" (1), Howells sets out to explore the complexities of identity construction in recent Canadian literature through the analysis of "a representative range" (1) of texts by Canadian women. These include a short story collection by Alice Munro—Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage—and nine novels—Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood; The Stone Diaries and Larry's Party by Carol Shields; Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald; The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto; Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo; The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz; and Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson. Each of these writers, Howells asserts, raises the question of "how much of anyone's identity is authentic and dependent on inheritance, and how [End Page 232] much is performative, subject to circumstances, and so redefinable in different contexts" (2). Her aim is to investigate continuities and differences of emphasis from one text to another and in this way to chart the changes that have taken place in Canadian literature in recent years. Acknowledging that her study focuses on Anglophone perspectives and writers most widely read outside of Canada, Howells proposes to make the case for the place of Canadian women's writing in the broader picture of contemporary political and cultural realities in Canada. These realities, she argues, together with a host of Canadian critics such as Barbara Godard, Smaro Kamboureli, Arun Mukherjee, and Charles Taylor among others, may best be thumbnailed today by the question of what constitutes Canadianness. Howells wishes to assess and establish the contribution of women's literary texts and cultural criticism to the "process of reimagining Canadianness" (10). Assessment of this contribution involves the key concepts of multiculturalism, feminism, and nationalism, each within the postcolonial context. Though these are given "different inflections" in the different texts Howells has chosen, she finds and demonstrates that each work contributes to re-imagining Canadian identity, often by revisiting Canadian history. Thus for example, historical fictions by Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin) and Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees) revise the image of earlier-day Canada as being a more homogenous and unified society than today. These writers, Howells writes, open up possibilities for "a revised rhetoric of Canadianness" (52), possibilities taken up in compelling ways by the other authors in her study. That the project to re-imagine Canadian identity is not limited to work by writers from Canada's...