Introduction
The notion of place plays a prominent part in the genesis of literature. As a repository of social space as well as geographic space, place emerges as a recurring theme particularly in regional literature. Furthermore, as an indispensable element of human experience, place in literature engages critical attention because the text functions as the psycho-spatial locus of the discursive system that is believed to be inhabited by an authorial presence firmly lodged in the confines of spatiotemporal dimensions. In a postmodern epoch characterized by a blossoming of theoretical perspectives and a widening of critical horizons, place captures more attention from both social theorists and literary critics. The entry of place into literary criticism is made possible by the belief that places are "combinations of the material and the mental" (Cresswell 13), and that places are "historically contingent" (Pred 279), hence "a process" (Massey 155). Place and literature are intimately entwined in the production, interpretation, categorization and perception of literary discourses. The interference of region with the economy of literary representation further complicates the situation. Region, as an ordered reconfiguration of place(s) invested with the power structure of sociopolitics, ideology, economy, culture, knowledge, and with the value inscription of subjectivity, further problematizes the aesthetics of literary exemplification grounded in a firm pursuit of the universal. Origin, identity, and authenticity pose as baffling central issues in literary as well as sociological discourses. In synchrony with the talk of British and American literatures, there arises a new critical inquiry of other literatures, those which are timidly teetering on the outskirts of Euro-American discourse. Questions regarding the identity, authenticity, and canonicity of these "other" literatures fall under the scrutiny of a wide array of theories such as post-colonialism, post-modernism, ecocriticism, and so forth. If issues like self, identity, meaning and truth are ruthlessly called into question in today's context, then time and place, as two of the most essential and indelible constituents or coordinates which constrain the existence of a subject in a certain nook of reality, dwell inescapably at the very centre of epistemological and ontological inquiries.
In the domain of Canadian literature, there is also evidence of the phantasmagorical influence of political reflections on place, the nation-state that is different from Britain and America. And Canadian literature has been pigeonholed into a variety of categories such as Commonwealth literature, North American literature, New World literature, and what not. These classes of nomenclature involve a cultural taxonomy dependent on spatiality, ineluctably embroiled in a political anxiety over identity and status. In the pre-Confederation era, place used to be a major concern for a good number of writers, such as Susanna Moodie and Anna Jameson, the latter of whom viewed Canada as a colony "not yet identified with the dearest affections and associations, remembrances, and hopes of its inhabitants […]. Their love, their pride, are not for poor Canada, but for high and happy England […]" (Bennett and Brown 71). Apparently, for many of the writers before Confederation, Canadian literature was a regional variety in the entire corpus of British literature. However, over the formative years of Canadian literature, the regional status of Canadian literature has gradually ramified into a nexus of issues concerning the inherence of locality to literature, especially to a literature so much tied to its local consciousness and political anxieties, as well as to cultural concerns of the textual representation of a nation-state well defined in terms of both geography and politics.
One can easily imagine the pandemonium when the vexatious notion of region is injected right in the heart of Canadian literature itself. No sooner had Canadian literary critics broken the fetters of conceptualizing Canadian literature as a regional literature than they found their edifice of national literature crumbling into a myriad of splinters, each of which disdainfully proclaiming itself as different or unique, strongly accusing the nationalists of their indifference to difference. Indeed, when one diverts one's eyes to the larger political and cultural scene of the nation, one is greeted by a din of voices trying to enunciate their own regional identities. Apparently, the colonial or regional status of Canada in history has triggered a host of issues which all have, so to speak, helped internalize the regionality(1) of Canadian literature itself. Instead of interrogating the validity of the regionality of Canadian literature, critics, historians, and theorists call into question the homogeneity of Canadian literature in the current socio-political contexts of Canada. For one thing, can a homogeneous "Canadian literature" speak the truth of the Canadian culture that has ever been so illusory and nebulous to define? What role does politics and region play in the production of regional literature? Writer Eli Mandel observes that region is one's home of origin, "the overpowering feeling of nostalgia associated with the place we know as the first place, the first vision of things, the first clarity of things" ("Images" 50). Observing on the necessity of local consciousness of the Canadian verse in the early twentieth century, T. E. Hulme felt "the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada" (qtd. in Woodcock, Meeting 7). As George Woodcock reiterates Hulme's sentiment, this "sense of locality" is "indispensable to a consciousness of regional identity" (Meeting 7).
In fact, regionalism has been a rather controversial subject in the realm of literary criticism. Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Hamlin Garland, for instance, have been among the most celebrated writers concerned with the literary representation of their regions. Literary regionalism in Canada, however, means more than "local color." The notion of regionalism is a socio-historical as well as geopolitical derivative; and regional divisions in Canadian literature are not a mere regional dissectionalism based on geographic splittism, but a dynamic cultural complication of various factors which weave an interactive fabric of social, political, economic, as well as psychological forces that shape the regional collective consciousnesses latent in the texts. And the dynamics of regionalism to some extent dilutes, if not dissolves, the geographic determinism of regionalism in literature and draws the topic into a larger interdisciplinary context, thus fixating literary regionalism in a more complicated lattice wrought with a variety of elements such as ethnic, cultural, political, etc. In his study of New World regionalism, David Jordan contends that regionalism in the New World "has particular implications […] [and] it has never been far removed from politics" (3). In a holistic sense, to sever literary regionalism from its political connotations and other related factors would jeopardize the subject itself and alienate literary regionalism from its social and cultural roots. In a word, literary regionalism is a multi-faceted issue that embraces a variety of disciplinary considerations. Based on this, it is necessary that we have a look at the wider atmosphere of scholarship for an explication of regions and regionalisms formulated by scholars outside of the literary scene.
I. Regions and Regionalisms
Despite the long-standing dispute over regional sectionalism, however, the very concept of region is still somewhat elusive, veiled in a mist of cognitive indeterminacy. First and foremost, Canada is considered to be a nation of "two solitudes," as the title of Hugh MacLennan's novel suggests, divided between two distinctive bodies of language, culture, politics, and tradition, namely, Quebec and the rest of Canada. Even outside of francophone Canada, the mood for a split vision of Canada is pervading. Proceeding from the perspective of political science, Franks expresses his worry about "how Canada is counted" (1) to achieve a substantial perspective on the nation. He interestingly counts Canada as a nation of "one nation-state, two founding languages, and cultures, four regions, ten provinces, and a plurality of groups and interests" (1). While one dismisses this mathematically-informed formulation of Canada with a chuckle, one still doubts whether any perception of Canada based on a largely political transformation is legitimate at all, especially when it comes to an assessment of Canada's literary and hence cultural lives. Nevertheless, to do Franks justice, he does make a distinction between region and province; therefore regional literature is not an equivalent of provincial literature, despite the fact that every year anthologies of literature swarm university libraries with an ever-increasing emphasis on provincial disparities. Franks' division of Canada's regions into four is made in terms of their political representations. As he contends, "[r]egionalism finds a place in the Constitution. The present senate is composed of 24 members each from the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, and the west, with the addition of six senators from Newfoundland and one each from the Yukon and Northwest Territories" (9). Rather than adhering to a political vision of regionalism, it is necessary to approach a more socio-historical version of regionalism in the study of literature, because a political and economic mapping of Canada is inevitably arbitrary. Such a division of Canada only reduces the nation into mere blocs on an atlas of provinces on the basis of common political and economic interests.
At the core of regionalism is the ubiquitous question of identity. Traditionally, Canada is believed to consist of five major regions: British Columbia, the Prairie Provinces, Ontario, Québec, and the Atlantic Provinces. And there emerged on April 1, 1999 a new region called the Nunavut Territory, which, together with the Northwest Territories, established in 1988, might stand as a new Arctic region in Canadian cartographic and literary topographies. Quite mysteriously, even the boundaries of the North can be somewhat elusive. Preston argues: "Note, however, that a sixth [region], the North, which consists of two territories and parts of some provinces, and which is quite different in every respect from the rest of Canada, is frequently overlooked" (5). And even within a single region, there could be vast differences. Take the Atlantic region for example. Newfoundland has always been considered to be the most backward of all provinces in Canada. And it was affiliated to the Confederation only in 1949 and varies tremendously in history and political interest from its neighbouring provinces such as P.E.I., Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Little wonder that this polyphonic enunciation of Canada has resulted in a cacophony of suppositions which culminate in a proposal of adjusting provincial boundaries to create a more "natural" cosmos of miscellany, as embodied in Ottawa Mayor Marion Dewar's ideal that "there ought to be thirty provinces in Canada in place of the present ten" (Preston 5). This voice of determinism of geographic genesis reflects what geographers call "formal regionalism."
The model of "formal regionalism" has been the most pervasive perception of regions before the 1970s and its lingering force is still palpable today. It classifies regions according to their common environmental features such as climate, topography, and so on. These formal regions mainly comprise the prairies, the northern territories, the Canadian Shield, the Laurentian Shield, the Atlantic, and Cordileran Section, etc. The natural landscape has triggered the inspiration of a great many writers who reveled in the geographic wonders of Canada in their travel writings and personal journals and records of confrontation with the harsh environment. Nevertheless, formal regions can also exist on features other than geography such as ethnicity, religion, and language. For instance, Westfall thinks "French Canada […] is a formal region based on the criteria of ethnicity and culture" (9). Formal regionalism has held profound sway on prairie writers, who mainly play the role of a "documentary geographer" preoccupied with the landscape of the region (Calder 55). Calder observes that such a definition of region "has not changed since […] 1949" (55), when Edward McCourt stressed the role of the writer as "a pictorial artist" whose job is concerned with photographic descriptions of the landscape (The Canadian West 49). Following Edward McCourt, Henry Kreisel is perhaps the most influential advocate of formal regionalism. He famously observed in 1968 that "discussions of the literature produced in the Canadian west must of necessity begin with the impact of the landscape upon the mind" (257). Laurie Ricou also champions this view of region, saying that writers should capture the qualities of a region through their "encounter with a specific distinctive landscape" (5). Examples spring to the mind. The most celebrated prairie classics are Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925) and W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind (1946). More recent examples include Sid Marty's bioregional novel about the Rockies Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook (1995), Sharon Butala's Wild Stone Heart (2000), cowboy writer Andy Russell's Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer (2001), etc.
The formalist conceptualization of regionalism fails to account for the miscellaneous nature of the Canadian experience widely acclaimed as a multicultural mosaic. Contemporary literary critics and Canadianists favour a more dynamic view of region rather than the conservative spatial hypothesis. A theory that has arisen in response to formalism is functional regionalism, which, according to Janine Brodie, "does not propose concrete regional boundaries that isolate one region from another," but intends to see regions "as part of an interconnected whole in which one regional configuration is largely a function or an expression of another" (141). Starting from the multiple perspectives of history, politics and spatial economics, Friesen notes that functionalists see regions in terms of "the political and social differences created over a certain span of time by the spatial patterns of language, religion, and economy and by popular discussion of community stereotypes" (6). Although inevitably rooted in a spatial division, this theory elicits a mutual exclusivity to define regions by transcending the provincial boundaries. In the literary scene, Dick Harrison, Eli Mandel, and W. H. New stand as the most prominent figures championing the functional conceptualization. Cultural identity surfaces prominently in the literary discourse of these critics who seek to assert the diversity of regional impulses. In his Unnamed Country, which bears traces of the heavy influence of formalism, Dick Harrison goes beyond geographic determinism and dives into the cultural baggage of the prairie life, arguing that the prairie becomes "less a thing 'out there' which must be shaped physically as well as imaginatively and more a territory within the psyche which must be explored and understood" (189). However, Harrison further implies that the prairie remains a concrete reality all the same, awaiting fictions to "make […] [the] place entirely real" (ix). Eli Mandel also argues that the "theoretical basis of literary regionalism is rather weaker than the historical or geographic but a sense persists that writers work out of locale or area, boundaries of some sort, defining sensibility" ("Writing West" 39). For functionalists, geographic boundaries are but a given, and the role of the artist is to fill the regional space with cultural material by enunciating a continuum of human truths that will be of universal value. Functionalists disdain the monarchy of the impassive geography that formalists worship, endowing the writer with an unprecedented power in the process of regional identity formation. The writer no longer functions as the medium by which the land itself expresses its identity; instead, he takes an active part in the construction of the region's identity through the writing process. The abolition of geographic boundaries naturally broadens, or, to a certain extent, narrows the scope of regionalism. For example, Canadian Mennonite writings such as Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness (2004) and Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China (1970), along with his novels of the north The Mad Trapper (1977) and A Discovery of Strangers (1994), largely fit into this category of regionalism.
Indeed, formalists tend to deem regions as static, avatarized and fossilized in the geographic features of a land. Nature is thus relegated to an asocial and ahistorical landscape devoid of human interaction. In contrast to the formalist effacement of the social productivity of regions, functionalists view regions as "effects or consequences of historical relationship" (Brodie 141), thus adding a temporal dimension to the conceptualization of region. Functionalism confers power upon humans in the cultural production of regions, viewing regions as processes that embody the political, economic, social, and cultural interactions of the people within the region or across regions. However, as a mode of theorization contingent on political economy and social difference, it reduces the interrelations among regions to a matter of political or economic domination or subordination. Regions are often perceived in connection to each other in terms of periphery and center, metropolitan and rural, wilderness and civilization. More precisely, functionalism instigates a value system regarding regional differences and often results in a host of binary oppositions.
In response to the predominance of the center-periphery paradigm in literature, there has arisen an alternative approach to regionalism beyond a holistic national narrative. Regional literature is deemed to be largely consequent upon a nation-wide celebration of regional differences and distinctiveness, grounded in the belief in "limited identities" of "the regional, ethnic and class identities we do have" (qtd. in Reid 74). This perspective on regionalism is espoused by a group of historians and literary critics as well, such as Ramsay Cook, J. M. S. Careless, Kenneth McNaught, and George Woodcock. By challenging the national narrative arising out of a singular cultural matrix, the framework of "limited identities" shifts the focus to the locality, region or social group in promotion of a primary sense of social, ethnic, and literary self. This has been echoed in McCourt's earlier manifesto of the Canadian West: "True regional literature is above all distinctive in that it illustrates the effect of particular, rather than general, physical, economic and racial features, […] if it does not illustrate the influence of a limited and particular environment it is not true regional literature" (The Canadian West 15). However, the discourse of regional identity within a limited framework is also problematic, for it tends to mitigate against the multiplicities of identity difference of a region by promoting a limited number of salient regional features subservient to the hierarchy of the national master narrative. The vocabulary of "limited identities" therefore turns out to be a preservation of the order of social fragmentation only within the contours of the grand narrative of the nation.
The functionalists' celebration of the imaginative power of the writer has also given rise to what R. Douglas Francis identifies as "mythic regionalism" (570), a perspective that privileges the mental power in cultural and literary production. The proponents of "mythic regionalism" tend to view regions as "more than physical or economic phenomena" (Francis 572). Instead, regions are more mentally constructed than determined by reality. For them, regions are "mindscape" (Francis 572). For instance, Marshall McLuhan remarks that the nation consists in the "hidden borders in men's minds" (241). Westfall also argues that "[r]egional writers take the cultural material of a place and transform it into a mythology that the people of the region can identify as their own. Without this mythology the cultural region would not exist" (11). This mode of conceptualization is typified in Robert Kroetsch's famous remarks: "In a sense we haven't got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real" (Creation 63). For instance, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, which is often coupled to ecofeminist mysticism, serves as a mythic representation of the Canadian north which expresses its regional identity "through metaphor" (Adamson 83). Alberta-born writer Aritha van Herk is obsessed with the north in Places Far From Ellesmere, a geografictione, which explores the conjunction of geography with autobiography and criticism in her description of the rigid territories of the Canadian north whose boundaries extend to Siberia, Russia. The book is no longer confined to the geographic limits of Alberta, and the author delights in being a Northern, calling it "a state of mind" (23). In fact, the north epitomized in various authors often spans a wide spatial range from British Columbia to Northern Newfoundland, covering part of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. And at the same time, these provinces also are affiliated to other categories of regionalism. Such a plural and dynamic view of regions gives full play to the mental power in the creation of the regional identity so that regions often take on a mythic aspect. The regions fictionalized in literary works are no more than imaginary localities that partake of the real places of the author's immediate circumstances. These localities are conceptualized, ideologized, and sometimes mythicized, and the condensation of the spatiotemporal truths in a specific setting often adds more potency and magnitude to the empirical world. Meanwhile, the mythic mode of regional definition is also temporally dynamic; historical, cultural, and social forces contribute to the mobility of regions. In plain terms, regional boundaries constantly change over time. In literary studies, the employment of mythic regions holds more validity insofar as critics acknowledge the necessity of the ways of life of a locality in molding regional writing. While anthologies of literature can base themselves on geographic definitions of the sources, literature per se must needs concern itself with the humanistic values of the regional, which in turn entails a valorization of geographic biases and restrictions. Critics such as W. H. New and Eli Mandel turn to subscribe to the mythic mode of perception. New argues in Articulating West that "Westerners" should not "pander to 'Eastern' Stasis" for fear of marring the "real distinctiveness and its [the Canadian West] mythic potential" (xiv). Similarly, Mandel holds that "we are to find our folklore outside of our own boundaries and that we must discover once more that literary and physical frontiers do not coincide" ("Romance" 57). The prairie for Mandel therefore serves as "a sort of complex conceptual framework […], a mental construct, a region of the human mind" ("Images" 47). New also acknowledges that regions in literature "are only loosely tied to geography and hence alter their meaning from place to place. But they remain useful, at least, in the Canadian context" (Articulating West xi).
Clearly, mythic regionalism equips the writer with an introspective power in finding the region's identity from within, preventing sheer geographical determinism while allowing for the writer's imaginative freedom. As a result, the perception of regions is no longer based only on geography but on a multitude of factors. Mythic regionalism can cover not only the prairies, the Maritimes, the North, but also regions grouped together according to particular common features, such as the Canadian backwoods, the wilderness, and so on. Meanwhile, it implies a stress on the mental mapping of regions while simultaneously foregrounding a conceptual mobility in understanding the boundaries between the regional and the national/universal in the age of regional agglomeration and globalization. Furthermore, it contributes to the categorization of aboriginal literature as a form of regional literature: regional not in a geographic sense, but in terms of ethnicity and culture. In turn, regional particulars and universals are internalized and mythicized thanks to the privileging of the latitudes of literary imagination.
In the final analysis, regions are essentially the product of human thought and activity, and the evolution of regions are dependent on a diversity of forces such as sociology, politics, economy, and culture. Nevertheless, by giving priority to the mental power in the construction of regions, mythic regionalism downplays the factors of reality and tends to be rather vague and elusive. Furthermore, mythic regionalism seems to have been derived from a misrecognition of cause and effect in human cognition: critics categorize regions by starting from the products of human imagination such as poetry, novels, and myths, instead of taking the physical place as the point of departure. Mythic regionalism thus reverses the dominant role that place plays in the formation of regions. It dematerializes regions and transforms the concrete existence of regions into abstract elements of the mind, failing to capture the spatiotemporal qualities of place as an objective entity before it is rendered subjective, social, and historical. Little wonder when Friesen points out that those "categories [of regionalism] are too simple to illustrate the diverse forces at work in human experience and the modern state," he rather mysteriously argues that in mythic regionalism, the regions "may have no geographic existence at all" ("Regionalism" 40).
In general, the myth of a homogeneous national unity of Canada is now being shattered as the problem of defining regions intensifies in the multicultural context. Sameness and unity give way to regional differences and diversity, and the country is split into a miscellany of regions. Even the once central urban areas of Ontario now come to be perceived as new regions. For instance, W. J. Keith's Literary Images of Ontario treats the traditional heartland as a "region at the centre" (12). He acknowledges that Ontario "is certainly a region that hesitates to admit that it has a regional literature" (14). George Woodcock's The Meeting of Time and Space: Regionalism in Canadian Literature is also worthy of mention, for this is the first and so far the only book-form treatise on regionalism from an overall approach. The book offers a panoramic view of regionalism in Canadian literature and focuses on a number of renowned Canadian writers by exposing their regional virtues which contribute to their national fame. Although this very short treatise seems rather like an introductory pamphlet on Canadian regionalism, the critic does not fail to notice the political concerns of literary regionalism: "In Canada at present there is a tendency to oppose regionalism to nationalism" (9). The most significant aspect of Woodcock's study is perhaps his division of Ontario as a region of Canada whose literature serves as an element in the regional variety of Canadian literature, despite the cultural, economic, political centralisms that have always been ascribed to it. As Andrew Nurse observes in a 2002 report prepared at the request of Heritage Canada Critics, the "regionallization" of Ontario is "now under way," and that such a process "will move Ontarian identity away from a national identity toward a more regionalized ideal of its position in Canada" (Nurse). In fact, in contemporary Canada, more attention is diverted to urban areas as city-centered regions. As Gilbert A. Stelter comments, cities, composed of regions centering on disparate communities, are also "the centre of more localized regions, of the territory surrounding them, made up of smaller places and countryside" ("Studying a City-Centered Region"). Based on his conception of city as a localized region, Stelter studies Guelph as a distinctive urban region with its own culture, history, and literature. Commenting on the publication of Guide to the Literary History of Waterloo and Wellington Counties (1985) edited by Gerald Noonan, Stelter remark that the local writers "could be considered a part of the tradition of writing about Canadian small towns that include Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies, and Alice Munro" ("Studying"). Paul Denham terms this trend in fiction "urban regionalism," which studies "the specific social milieu of a particular city or section of a city" (10), such as Ethel Wilson's Vancouver, Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown, Mordecai Richler's St. Urbain Street, and Hugh Hood's Montreal. The time has indeed come for critics and theorists to reassess regionalism in the context of postmodern Canada in the light of multiculturalism and heterogeneity instead of confining the regions to a centre-periphery paradigm.
II. Region, Writing, Reading, and Criticism
A relevant examination of literary regionalism seems of necessity to start with a proper understanding of the tripartite relationship between region, writing, and reading. So far in literary practice and theory, a lot has been uttered on the form and content of literary regionalism, but virtually nothing has been mentioned of the two most prominent elements in the reconstruction of a region, namely, reader and writer. Theorists tend to focus on the region as an immutable presence that determines writing, neglecting the subjective processes of the writer and the reader. Mary Austin argues that in the production of regional literature the writer must have "lived deeply and experientially into his environment" (qtd. in Jordan 8). Austin is right in saying so; however, she does not specify the manner in which the place enters the symbolic world of the text. Herb Wyile argues that "[t]he term regionalism is used alternately to describe the unifying principle of a corpus of literary texts (that is, a regional literature), the attachment of a writer to a particular place, the diversity of writing within the larger body of a national literature, or a kind of ideological consciousness or discourse" ("Introduction" vi). Wyile's definition perceives regionalism as an antithesis of national literature and a localized consciousness or discourse that shapes a regional writing. Unlike the experiential quality posited in Austin's theory of regionalism, Wyile's model stresses the author's obsession with a particular place, thus lending an ideological and psychological aspect to literary regionalism. Furthermore, Wyile's theory highlights the ambivalent elements in the temperament of regional writing, namely, the unifying nationalist force and a centrifugal local ideology. Herb Wyile's definition is evidently more applicable to the Canadian context than Austin's empirical hypothesis. However, his theoretical formulation is still kept in obscurity; what's more, he leaves out the factor of readership. For instance, does the reader partake of the formation of a regional literature? What is the relationship between the author and the locality? What are the special requirements of the settings of a writing that can be referred to as regional?
Literary regionalism indeed should not be restricted to an understanding of geographic determinism defined by borderlines. One should be aware that regionalism is a projection of the psychology of the author, of the reciprocal interactions between the author and the place with which he is obsessed. Regionalism is a mirroring of the physicality of the place and the socio-historical, cultural, as well as psychological connotations with which it is impregnated. In other words, regionalism in Canadian literature possesses attributes of transparency and metaphoricity(2). Whereas the transparent mapping of a region serves a realistic and mimetic purpose, actualized in descriptions of landscape, climate, historic events, etc., metaphorical region is an internal abstraction of a place, a psychological spatialization of the author with his sense of roots and his identification with the place, a mental reproduction of the place. Metaphorical region, whose existence depends on the material contours of the physical region, is the product of an individual authorial act in the process of literary creation, but this individual mental mapping of the region is also part of the collective consciousness of the region. The regionalist text becomes a site receptive of the psychic investment of the individual author whose purpose, nonetheless, is to elicit a collective recognition of and identification with the place from the part of the reader. Metaphorical region may not of necessity be as identifiable as transparent region due to the degree of condensation and compression by dint of the authorial interposal. The metaphorical quality of literary regionalism thus may blur the physical limits of regions to some extent but retain the transcendental features of the region that can in turn be refashioned and restored to its identifiable form in introspection. Metaphorical region in a text, therefore, can be a metamorphosis or displacement of the physical region. It is because of the introspective function of metaphorical region that we may call it mythic or conceptual. However, this is not to isolate transparent or physical region from metaphorical region. On the contrary, they are complementary and hence meaningless in isolation from each other.
In addition to the authorial element in literary regionalism, the reader also plays an indispensable role in the establishment of a regionalist writing. However, practically nothing has been said in reference to the significance of the reader in the reconstruction of a region. Writing in 1975, Robert D. Chambers mentioned in a passing note the concept of regionalism by drawing attention to the role of readership, thus adding an extra dimension to the notion of literary regionalism, a psychological interaction between writer and reader and their reciprocal identification with the region itself. According to him, the formulation of a regional writing rests not only on the interactions between the region and the writer, but on the reader as well. According to Chambers, the constitution of a regional writing is dependent on two fundamental psychological processes, namely, "the individual writer's awareness of his own identity, his sense of roots […] [and] the common ground which the reader establishes when he encounters the particular experience of the writer" (27). In a regionalist text, the reader always participates in the restitution of the place. The regionalist text, other than a projection of the yearnings of the author, serves as the receptacle of the desires of the reader as well. The regionalist text, therefore, is ascribed with a triple signification: it is a carrier of the psychological commutations between author and place, between author and reader, and finally between reader and place. Both author and reader impose a layer of signification upon the text so that the text itself becomes a repository of identification. In terms of the reinstatement process of the place through the text, the regionalist text undergoes a chain of transformations, a ciphering and deciphering of the textual message, and a superimposition of the identity on the part of the reader upon that of the author. Therefore, the interpretation of the regionalist text is subjected to a psychological-textual-psychological sequence through which the place is filtered and sifted, as it were, only by means of a prism absorbent of deflective and diffusive rays. In terms of the empiricism of the regionalist text, it functions as a locale of experiential encounter between the author and the reader, a common ground where the writer invites the reader to participate in his ritual in honour of the region. It is important to note that despite the heated disputes over the merits and demerits of literary regionalism in the history of Canadian criticism, the reader has never been granted his legitimacy in the production of meaning and reconstruction of the regional space. Although the subject of regionalism is never free from the invasion of politics and ideology, the regionalist text should not be converted into a regime in mere articulation of the hidden agenda of the writer/reader as politician. To restore artistic value to a regionalist text, if possible to a lesser or greater degree, the writing and reading processes should in no way be left in oblivion.
With regard to the reception of regionalism, controversy over the advantages and disadvantages of literary regionalism has never subsided. The concept itself is more complicated than can be dismissed with a simple statement. In public discourse, it often connotes a pejorative sense. Raymond Williams, a prominent scholar in cultural studies, defines the term "regional" as a notion located within the "assumption of dominance and subordination" (Keywords 265). Thus it is used to suggest the inferiority or circumferentiality of the kind of writing which is often preoccupied with a narcissistic auto-representation. And the kind of Canadian experience in textual rendition is often considered to be of less magnitude than the "universal" themes of national literature. However, it is crucial to note that regionalism and nationalism, though a rather paradoxical pair of opposites, have been in existence all along in conflicting harmony in the evolution of Canadian literature.
Recent theories and criticism in Canada begin to revolt against this often stereotyped form of writing, and regionalism seems to have revived after its debasement as an obstacle to the growth of a national literature. Regionalism is now deemed by some critics as a source of literary creativity, owing to its attendance to the particular, the local, the specific. Diane Bessai holds that regionalism should no longer be viewed "as narrow, limited, parochial, backward, out-dated or isolationist. In its positive sense regionalism means rooted, indigenous, shaped by a specific social, cultural and physical milieu" (7). Frank Davey, one of the most prominent advocates of regionalism, in his theorizing of post-nationalist Canadian literature, describes Canada as "a nation in which social structures no longer link regions or communities, political process is doubted, and individual alienation has become normal" (Post-National Arguments 266). In "Regionalism, Postcolonialism, and (Canadian) Writing," Herby Wyile also suggests the necessity of viewing regionalism as "an important element in […] postcolonial writing" (139), as a product of globalism in answer to the subversion of the center-margin order. It is a new order under which the notions of disparity and heterogeneity are put in the limelight. This no doubt comes as an important manifesto of literary regionalism against the traditional suppression of regionalism in achieving a monolithic national literary identity.
It is worthwhile to point out that regionalism in Canadian literature subsists not only in the sphere of creative writing but in literary criticism as well. Not only are writers attached to their regions but also critics. These critics, when approaching the regionalist text, adopt the position of an insider of that place, a truth-dispenser and restorer of the text with regional acumen and vision. For the regionalist critic, his obligation is, as it were, to expound on the aesthetics of the regionalist text so often consigned in oblivion by nationalists. The regionalist critic often starts with a belief that specificity and individuality are the constituents of universality and homogeneity, thus regionalist aesthetics must be a common denominator of the universal literary virtues. Therefore, the distinction between a universal text and a regional text evaporates, and the regional text is restorable to a set of elemental constructs as valid as those of a "universal" text. Regionalism hence transforms into a style of criticism, as in the practice of Laurence Ricou, Henry Kreisel, Robert Kroetsch, George Woodcock, and Herbe Wyile in particular. Furthermore, this regionalist style of criticism is more than a manner of critical appraisal. It is a methodology, a consistent mode of criticism in the domain of Canadian literature, characterized by a persistent advertence to humanistic issues, sociological elements, and thematic considerations. While today's critics in Canada accuse Canadian criticism in the past decades of being predominantly thematic and crudely primitive, few are aware of the fact that this approach to literature has been the overall critical climate so that regionalism can be said to have acquired the status of a system of criticism.
Based on the above, I would argue that regionalism in Canadian literature as a variety of criticism(3) is of great importance in Canadian literary studies, although this academic approach has never arrested serious critical attention on the level of a cognitive mode. In particular, the subject of regionalism is worth academic focus in that it involves a triple significance, namely, its literary application, its critical worth, and its sociological relevance. Furthermore, regionalism as a branch of discipline in the broader range of sociology, cultural geography, and history is of great significance, for it pervades almost every aspect of the Canadian life, including politics, economy, geography, etc. The study of literary regionalism, therefore, will be conducive to a comprehensive perception of regionalism as a cultural phenomenon in Canada.
In addition, the study of Canadian literary regionalism outside of Canada is of great worth in that it may offer a distanced view of the literary and critical climate in Canada, which is inevitably implicated in an incessant struggle for cultural assertion. Regionalist criticism within Canada is most often susceptible to an immanent psychological empathy which may inhibit an otherwise more unprejudiced analysis of literary regionalism(4). An exterior survey of regional literature in Canada will afford a relatively unbiased assessment of the historical role of regionalism and thematic criticism, which has served as the dominant method of literary scholarship. This is significantly efficacious especially when regionalism seems to be under fierce attack nowadays, not necessarily because of its alleged primitiveness in literary substance but critics' urgent yearning for a literature abreast of the world and a criticism that goes with it.
III. A Structural Sketch of the Research
Obviously, the complexity of the term regionalism and the diversity that it implies make it impossible to do a thorough survey of all the regions in Canada. Instead of offering an all-inclusive enumeration of the regions in literary representation, I will exemplify two regions with most salient geographic and cultural features, namely, the Prairies and the Maritimes. The reason is that both Prairie literature and Maritime literature have been marginalized and subjected to stringent critical scrutiny in the face of nationalism and internationalism which seem to favour the literary dominance of Ontario urban centrism. Yet Prairie literature and Maritime literature are the most distinctive forms of literary regionalism in Canada. Both literatures are by and large imprinted with very distinctively regional geographic and customary hallmarks, characterized by their primary alignment with the landscape and their devotion to the dire or mystic aspects of regional life. The two regions, situated in distance from each other along the east-west axis of Canadian geography, possess totally different topographical features, histories, and ethnic compositions. The Prairies are a vast inland region with extreme temperatures, whereas the Maritimes are isolated Atlantic islands which rely heavily on the ocean for their way of life. Based on such vast disparities, the selection of the two regions for analysis will perhaps enable us to understand the nature of pluralism of Canadian culture and literature. Such a view of variety is no doubt in keeping with the postnational belief in disparity and diversity.
This book falls into three parts. The first chapter offers a cosmic view of regionalism in the history of Canadian literature. Rooted in its particular socio-historical contexts, literary regionalism is a longstanding issue riddled with political and cultural concerns. The history of literary regionalism in Canada indicates that regionalism has been in constant flux regarding its scope, extent, emotive coloring, significance, etc. Recent controversy over regionalism has swerved from a national scale to a more local scale. And it is the very degradation and internalization of regionalism that is the focus of present-day critical censure. And regional celebration today is a deliberate subversion of nationalism and universalism, and it is a deconstruction of the internal hierarchy of literary canonicity based on a geographic and sociopolitical centrism.
Such a shift in ideological stance necessarily poses problems for the canonization of regional literature. Needless to say, there is a mutual influence between canonicity and politics centering on the nation/region rift. Although canonicity works on concepts such as aesthetic value and literary quality, these terms, however, when contextualized in the field of Canadian literature, become rather illusory and amorphous in meaning and application. Canonicity is especially tainted with strong social, economic, and political colors. In the assessment of regionalism, literary value is always determined, in some measure, by the political aesthetic of national or regional interests. A pure literary canon free from the pervading influence of a political unconscious is nonexistent.
Thematic criticism as a major method of literary scholarship has also been called into question since the 1980s. It has grown so notorious for its nationalist abstractions and generalizations that it is widely repudiated for its inadvertence to the literary merits of literature and for its violation of the spirit of cultural diversity. The politically-minded thematicists are mainly concerned about the so-called "Canadian imagination" (Frye, "Conclusion" 320) latent in the literary text and their efforts are applied in the direction of excavating a Canadianness, or a Canadian way of literary expression, from literature. For some regionalists, thematic criticism has become an instrument wielded by nationalists to set up a homogenous body of concepts and patterns out of the various regional literatures. It tends to revoke the multiplicity of interpretation of the literary text and blot out possibilities of difference by granting priority to sameness, similarity, identity, and unity. However, the overall realistic narrative of Canadian regionalism, which focuses on regional details and accuracy, entails the persistence of thematic criticism in taking charge of the realistic elements. Thus the application of thematicism to regionalism is not a historical coincidence but a necessity. For a realistic regional writing which aims to vocalize the truths of a locality, thematic criticism functions as a major instrument in propounding the primarily humanistic and sociological values of the text.
It is worthy of mention that critics in Canada have failed to notice the distinction between "contextual thematics" and "textual thematics" which exist in the traditional terminology of thematic criticism. By calling attention to such a terminological difference, I aim to emphasize the critical obfuscation of the concept of thematic criticism in Canada, which leads to a much poignant attack on the practice of pattern abstractions in regionalism, with the dismissal or neglect of textual and humanistic analysis of literature.
Chapter Two studies the short stories of Sinclair Ross. Ross's short stories are characterized with a stark realism, predominantly concerned with the grave issues of alienation, morality, love, as well as the impact of the prairie landscape on the human psyche. Ross captures the poignant scene of alienation through a nuanced observation of the prairie family as the basic unit of society. His characters are often battered farmers eking out an existence from the puritanical style of life on the prairie. However, traditional criticism on Sinclair Ross tends to overemphasize the deterministic force of the landscape and neglect the interpenetration of man and landscape. Drawing upon the conceptions of landscape in cultural geography, painting, sociology, etc., I attempt to construe Ross's prairie landscape as a human-centred landscape of production and reproduction. Landscape no longer functions as either a deliberate or impassive agent that instigates marital alienation and familial conflicts. Alienation arises not so much from the malicious landscape itself as from the characters' conflicting views of the landscape in terms of its productivity and utility. Such clashing ideologies steeped in materialism often result in grave symptoms of alienation such as hippomaniac behaviour and distrust of human camaraderie. Eye aversion and the image of battered houses darken the bleak view of Ross's moral landscape. Reality orchestrates the symphony of imagination and morality which are often at odds with each other in Ross's ethico-geographic landscape. Faced with the barren land and enslaved to the needs of survival, Ross's men conceive of a prairie existence with a severely impaired vision, a vision finely adjusted to the commands of production. The men are plagued by an incessant trouble with imagination, and the human mind is unable to break the shackles of materialism and pragmatism. Freedom of imagination, in the eyes of Ross's men, constitutes a blatant transgression of the physical world, hence of the moral code of rural farm existence which permits of no fantasy or imagination.
Chapter Three examines Alistair MacLeod's short stories of Cape Breton. As is typical of regional literature in Canada, MacLeod's stories are also told in a realistic fashion that betrays, to a great extent, the autobiography of the author himself. Cape Breton's topographical features are engraved in the life and character of MacLeod's people so that the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity is often repealed. The killing professions of mining, logging, and fishing often figure as important constructs of the social and cultural landscape of Cape Breton.
MacLeod's text is marked with a heavy celebration of ethnic and communal identity. Along with geographic features, ethnic, and cultural elements work in collaboration in delimiting the regional boundary of Cape Breton. Family legends and local names are incorporated in the constellation of textual signifiers. A recurring theme in the stories is belligerence to the outsider. However, the motif is veiled in high symbolism and well-contrived metaphors so that MacLeod's fiction merits scrupulous examination. MacLeod's intense interest in the details of the local fauna and flora affords the reader an alternative insight into his animal allegory of regional identity and cultural nostalgia.
MacLeod's stories are often elegiac in tone, suffused in a nostalgic atmosphere, lamenting the loss of the cultural ancestry of the Scottish Highlanders. By going back into the past of the Celtic tradition and ancestry, MacLeod writes on the borders between the temporal and the spatial. Both clannish history and personal incidents constitute the cultural historicity of MacLeod's rural communities. The personal is to a certain extent coterminous with the communal. The past is often brought to bear upon the present, so is the present on the future. The author's disruption of the sequential order of time and partial anachronism formulates a timelessness in the mental concretization of the cultural myth of the region. Spatial displacement and temporal continuity is thus brought within a violent duality in the formation of region by means of MacLeod's intertextuality.
MacLeod's stories are evocative of a spatial analysis in terms of the trialectical relationship of person, place, and identity. A strong sense of the physical space and imaginative space fulfils the characters' identification. Identity thus is not only strengthened in situ, but often achieved in exile. Personal space frequently adjoins social and cultural spaces so that MacLeod's narrative of the small physical space of an individual often embodies a narrative of bigger social spaces on a larger scale. Furthermore, identity crisis also arises from the crevasses between actual space and imaginary and imaginative spaces. The antithesis of spatial enclosure and openness in different degrees foregrounds the pervading themes of entrapment and escape. By examining the smallness of the personal space, MacLeod calls attention to the larger spaces of place and region, and eventually, to the perennial question of identity.
By way of contrast, Sinclair Ross's stories are mainly concerned with the prairie landscape, whereas MacLeod's elegiac text is preoccupied with the Scottish Highlands, which endows him with a trans-Atlantic perspective on regional identity. Ross focuses on the "formal" features of the prairie while MacLeod writes from memory, featuring the "mythic" aspect of his Cape Breton Island. His mental reconstruction of the remembered place provides an excellent example of metaphorical region. The stories of Sinclair Ross and Alistair MacLeod thus can serve as good examples of the two main modes of regional conceptualization, namely, formal regionalism and mythic regionalism.
The short story rather than the novel engages my interest. In effect, the Canadian short story is classified by many critics as a sub-genre of the short story called the "short story cycle(5)" (Lynch 1), or the "linked sequence of short stories" (Carpenter, "Fear" 155), or the "linked short story" (Schroeder 162), or "short story sequence" (New A History 125), The story cycle, as Carpenter remarks, "sits between the short story collection and the novel or novella," and the stories "are connected by their setting, and perhaps by similarities of theme and execution" ("Fear" 155). Stephen Henighan acclaims the genre as a "quintessential Canadian literary form" ("Linking" 113). Gerald Lynch also argues that the genre is "well suited to the concerns of Canadian writers intent upon portraying a particular region or community, its history, its characters, its communal concerns" (16). He also notes that "many Canadian novelists who first found success in the short form are better there than in the novel" (12). The same thing can be said about Sinclair Ross and Alistair MacLeod, whose stories have been widely anthologized and acclaimed(6). My selection of the two writers is based on the understanding that they best represent their local regions and have achieved national and even international fame although they are often labeled as "regional writers."
Last but not least, despite the fame of the two writers, their short fiction has been either largely neglected or insufficiently critiqued. Although Sinclair Ross is acclaimed as a most prominent writer in Prairie literature, and his novel As for Me and My House has arrested tremendous critical interest, yet his short stories, since their publication in the 1940s, have aroused scant critical interest owing to their stark realism and thematic tautology. The meager amount of criticisms available now take the form of primitive plot summaries and opinion notes that are hardly worthy of note. Whereas in the case of Alistair MacLeod, criticisms on him are also a pittance, mainly in the form of book reviews, interviews, and journal articles whose number totaling no more than ten. Critical attention due to the short fiction of Alistair MacLeod and Sinclair Ross is thus deplorably inadequate in comparison with the voluminous criticisms showered on, say, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, to say nothing of Margaret Atwood. Part of the scheme of the present research is, therefore, to call attention to the short stories of Sinclair Ross and Alistair MacLeod in the hope of bringing to light the literary merits of the two writers who have often been restricted to the backwaters of regionalism.
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(1) The word "regionality" should be treated as having a dual significance. A distinction should be made between the "regionality" and the "regional status" of Canadian literature. I use the word regionality to refer to both the peripheral status of regional literature and to regional adherence in Canadian literary works, but with more emphasis on the latter implication. However, "regionalist" will be used in later text to stress the writer's regional adherence in his work.
(2)The terms "transparency" and "transparent region" are used here to allude to the geographic determinism of the formalist conceptualization of region. It should be noted that transparent region is only a relative notion, for language operates by means of transference from one type of reality to another and is radically metaphorical in nature. According to Derrida, the signifier is not directly related to the signified. Language and reality are forever divorced through the incessant deferral of meaning. Regions, constructed through the agency of literary representation by writers, become processes that function as a joint in the chain of signifiers in delayed reference to a final "truth." There is never a full replica of physicality in the representation of a region. The actual, physical region is constantly receding out of the vision of the reader who attempts to grasp the "true" landscape of a region. Literary regionalism, therefore, is metaphorical in character. Through the triple operation of the tricky text and the author's and reader's subjectivity, the physicality of the region surfaces only as a fragmented version of the region proper. I use the word "transparent" because etymologically "trans" means "through" and "parent" in Latin means "appear." Therefore, transparent region and metaphorical region reveal themselves to the reader to different degrees. Neither can be readily restored to the actual status. Transparent region and metaphorical region are not proposed as modes of regional conceptualization but as processes of literary representations of region. Transparency serves as a straightforward mode of literary representation of region, focusing on the physical or objective features of the region such as the landscape, the climate, historic events, and so on; whereas metaphoricity takes charge of the region by attending to the subjective or cultural aspects of the region such as local customs, ethnicity, folklore, etc. More importantly, metaphoricity anchors the psychology of the regionalist writer who is more often than not preoccupied with the "mindscape" of his region.
(3)Although regionalism in criticism, or regionalist criticism, has never before appeared in critical terminology in Canada, some critics were aware of the difference in literary criticism between Canada and other national literatures. These critics suggested that the literary criticism in Canada was a distinctive variety of criticism. Carl Ballstadt used the term "Canadian criticism" in his Introduction to an anthology titled The Search for English-Canadian Literature: An Anthology of Critical Articles from the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (U of Toronto P, 1975). Ballstadt is not alone in adopting this term. Among others that made use of this term were a good many critics such as Alan Crawley, John Sutherland, and Northrop Frye. In their terminologies, the meaning of the term "Canadian criticism" oscillates from sociological perspectives to thematic criticism to primitive criticism to criticism in Canada, and to regional considerations as well. George Woodcock deliberately opposes "Canadian criticism" to other schools of criticism in his article "Surviving the Paraphrase." In an online course on literary criticism, Frank Davey calls attention to "Canadian criticism" as a weird anomaly of literary study resisting incorporation into the international critical discourse. (Canadian Theory and Criticism. 24 Apr. 2002 <http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/entries/canadian_theory_and_criticism-_1.html>.) Most notably, Eli Mandel cursively uses the term "regional criticism" in "Writing West: On the Road to Wood Mountain" to mean a critical interest that "concentrates on place" (40).
(4)Australian, New Zealand, and Indian critics have all focused on the subject of literary regionalism in Canada by drawing analogy between the regionalism of their nations with that of Canada. Although their studies on Canadian regionalism offer a comparative perception of this subject as a cultural construct, their theories have been more or less tinted with a sympathetic tone in their attempt to find an in-between parallelism in the hope of extracting ultimate truths from the subject. These studies have not been free from political and psychological sympathies such as identity, coloniality, cosmopolitanism, indigeneity, ethnic multiplicity, and so forth. Books of this kind are, to name a few, Reginal Berry and James Acheson's Regionalism and National Identity: Multi-Disciplinary Essays on Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, M. F. Salat's The Canadian Novel: A Search For Identity (published in Delhi), and M. P. Singh and Chandra Mohan's Regionalism and National Identity: Canada, India, Interdisciplinary Perspectives (published in India).
(5)This Canadian genre resembles very much the short story cycles of Sherwood Anderson, as exemplified by his Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of stories with common themes, imagery, as well as recurrent settings and characters. However, W. H. New argues that the Canadian short story cycle is to be distinguished from the American form because it is closely connected to Canada's literary tradition in "their literary forms, the sketch and the Rahmenerzahlung" (Dreams of Speech 242), such as the stories of D. C. Scott and Stephen Leacock. Gerald Lynch remarks that the story cycle is "a form in which Canadian writers have achieved considerable eminence" (1) but he argues: "I am not suggesting here at the outset that the story cycle has been ignored by American and British writers […] only that Canadian writers have demonstrated both a strong preference for and high accomplishment in this form from the late nineteenth century onwards. I am not claiming that the short story cycle is somehow inherently a Canadian genre, only that it is distinctly and distinctively a Canadian genre" (1).
(6)There are numerous other writers who excel in the short story. For example, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Sandra Birdsell, D. C. Scott, Stephen Leacock, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Leon Rooke, Audrey Thomas, Clark Blaise, Hugh Hood, and so on.
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