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Literary Criticism General

The Borders of Nightmare

The Fiction of John Richardson

by (author) Michael Hurley

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 1992
Category
General, Canadian, General
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487590383
    Publish Date
    Dec 1992
    List Price
    $27.95

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Description

John Richardson was Canada's first native-born poet-novelist and 'The Father of Canadian Literature.' Michael Hurley offers the first detailed account of Richardson's fiction rather than of his life or sociological importance.

 

Hurley makes a convincing case for Richardson as an important early cartographer of the Canadian imagination and the originator of 'Southern Ontario Gothic.' He explores Richardson's influence on James Reaney, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Christopher Dewdney, Frank Davey, and Marian Engel.

 

Arguing that Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers hold central places in our literature, Hurley shows how these two works established a set of boundaries that our national literary discourse has largely kept hidden. Focusing on the protean concept of the border in the fiction of this man from the periphery, The Borders of Nightmare underlines the importance of boundaries, margins, shifting edges, and the coincidence of equally matched opposites in necessary balance to both Richardson and subsequent writers.

 

In an age of postmodernism these novels – riddled as they are with discontinuities, paradoxes, ambiguity, and unresolved dualities that problematize the whole notion of a stable, coherent national or personal identity – anticipate and define a number of concerns that preoccupy us today.

About the author

Michael Hurley is a professor of English at the Royal Military College of Canada.

Michael Hurley's profile page