This article explores Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station (2023) as a Canadian feminist reimagining of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), examining how theatrical performance becomes a site for negotiating ageing female identity. Set in rural Ontario and centring on sixty-two-year-old actress Lulu Blake, the novel stages a collapse of professional and personal selfhood that echoes, but ultimately diverges from, Beckett’s existential vision. Drawing on feminist performance theory and social identity frameworks, the article analyses how theatricality and intertextuality shape representations of ageing in Snow Road Station . While Happy Days presents ageing as immobilisation and erasure, Hay recasts this through a feminist intervention that positions performance as a struggle between cultural expectations of invisibility and the insistent presence of the ageing female subject. In doing so, Hay’s novel transforms existential paralysis into a narrative of resilience and social reintegration, grounding later-life identity in seasonal, communal, and performative renewal.

As a visual expression of the world we live in, landscapes and forests are central to a contemporary photography concerned with the manifestations of the Anthropocene. If the concept of solastalgia developed by Glenn Albrecht speaks of a sense of placelessness, despair and incomprehension induced by the many manifestations of climate change, I want to suggest that Lorraine Gilbert’s photographs of Canadian landscapes and forestscapes problematise our relationship with the planet by investigating the places we create for ourselves and the relationships we cultivate with other living organisms. I will suggest that Gilbert’s work, beyond its Anthropocenic expression, offers an aesthetic of relationality that seeks to evoke places of possibility rather than placelessness and loss. This paper will investigate the photographic forms which lead Gilbert to reclaim, remember, and reinvent non-exploitative relations to the land.

This article argues that Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) offers a material thought that engages with the emerging New Materialist feminist insights. By contrasting with the concurrent second-wave feminism, which often sought to deny certain physical characteristics of women, Atwood embraces the inherent traits of femininity and facilitates the protagonist’s reconnection with her body through a return to the wilderness. As the protagonist interacts with the material nature around her, she comes to understand that her body is not a fixed entity but a trans-corporeal, fluid body that is open to and engaged in exchange with its surroundings. The protagonist also symbolises the oppressed Canadian national identity. In opposition to the European humanist logic represented by Americans, she emphasises a kinship, as described by Donna Jeanne Haraway, where all humans and non-humans share a common flesh, shape through interaction, and co-constitute one another. Ultimately, by exploring the fluidity of the protagonist’s body and identity, Atwood envisions a post-human democratic politics where humans and non-humans coexist as equals, fostering interdependence and co-evolution rather than domination or exploitation.

Carol Shields, in her debut novel, Small Ceremonies , covertly criticises white Canadian women writers’ hesitation to address the Indigenous peoples’ land rights. At a time when ecofeminism is taking shape, the protagonist, Judith Gill, attempts to establish a literary tradition that will liberate white women and help them save the exploited land. Yet in an aborted Gothic storyline, the Inuit carvings she remembers having seen in an eerie apartment serve as reminders of the unresolved colonial past and confront her with her guilt: prioritising white women’s relation with the land, she reiterates the white patriarchal canon’s erasure of the Indigenous peoples from the land and (literary) history. It will be argued that Shields implies that white Canadian women writers must adopt an anti-colonial position and reinscribe the Indigenous peoples and their land relations – but avoid speaking, in reiteration of imperialist policies, about and for Indigenous others.

This paper analyses the materiality of temporality in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Uncollected Poems II (1991–2023)’ from her recent volume Paper Boat (2024) through the lens of Barbara Adam’s theory of timescapes. Atwood’s poetry resists linear narratives, as she crafts temporal terrains where temporalities blur. Through close readings of the poems, the article demonstrates how Atwood transforms time into a material and affective landscape shaped by memory, loss, and recurrence. These poems unfold recursive structures, liminal spaces, and fragile moments of immediacy, offering a poetics of return and repetition that reframes temporality as embodied and relational. Atwood’s speaker navigates time’s instability by engaging with space, nature, and language, creating layered experiences that challenge the invisibility of time. Ultimately, the paper argues that these previously unpublished poems construct timescapes that foreground the material and emotional textures of time, urging readers to re-enter poetic space as a form of temporal resistance and existential continuity.

The intention of this article is to use ethnographic data to advance a greater understanding of the Acadian diaspora, and the existence of peripheral communities, from within the discipline of ethnic studies. To that end, we present the Upper St John Valley in northern Maine as a culturally marginalised Acadian borderland, featuring discussions elucidated from ethnographic-style interviews conducted in 2018 with local Maine residents. These interviews focus on (1) the community value of the French language, (2) the challenges of living along an international border, and (3) how those issues manifested in co-hosting the Congrès mondial acadien in 2014. The reflections offer readers a nuanced, lived experience of the realities of Acadie and are discussed within a framework that presents the manifestation of power relations through an intersection of diaspora and borderlands.