Nature in North American Contact Zones
North American Contact Zones
Gabriel Stedman. Narrative of a Five Year's Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. 1776.
Mary Prince. The History of Mary Prince. 1831.
Martin Delany. Blake. 1859.
William Wells Brown. Clotel; Or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. 1853.
William Dean Howells. Their wedding journey. 1871. (American writing about Canada)
Sara Jeanette Duncan. The imperialist. 1904.
Peter McArthur. The Affable Stranger. 1921.
Grey Owl. Pilgrims of the wild. 1934.
Robert Haig-Brown. Return to the river. 1941.
George Lamming. In the Castle of My Skin. 1953.
V.S. Naipaul. A House for Mr. Biswas. 1961.
Philip W. Keller. Splendour from the land. 1963.
Sonny Ladoo. No Pain Like This Body. 1972.
Claude McKay. Bananna Bottom. 1974.
Earl Lovelace. The Dragon Can't Dance. 1979.
Simone Schwarz-Baart. The Bridge of Beyond. 1982.
Jamaica Kinkaid. At The Bottom of the River (short stories published in the New Yorker). 1983.
Michelle Cliff. Abeng. 1985.
Karen Tei Yamashita. Through the Arc of the Rainforest. 1990.
Aritha Van Herk. Places far from Ellesmere: a geofictione. 1990.
Rosario Ferré. The Youngest Doll. 1991.
Michelle Cliff. Free Enterprise. 1993.
Derek Walcott. The Bounty. 1997.
Erna Brodber. Louisiana. 1997.
Dione Brand. Land to LIght On. 1997.
Edwidge Danticat. The Farming of Bones. 1998.
Cecil Foster. Slammin' Tar. 1998.
Margaret Atwood. Surfacing. 1998
Shani Mootoo. Cerus Blooms at Night. 1999.
Carmen Arguille. ¿Que Pasa with La Raza, eh? 2000.
Rabindranath Mahraj. the Lagahoo's Apprentice. 2001.
Stephen Greenblatt. Marvelous Possession: The Wonder of the New World. 1991.
Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes. 1992.
consider for list:
Catherine Parr Strickland Trail. Canadian Crusoes: a tale of the Rice Lake plains. 1852. (British writer who moved to Canada - three children lost on the plains joined by Indian girl, create agricultural settlement, found by old lumberer and returned to European parents, girl marries one of the boys)
Susanna Moodie. Roughing it in the Bush. 1852 (memoir - "emigrant's guide" for British people moving to Canada)
William A. Adamson. Salmon Fishing in Canada. 1860. (Canadian nature writing, fishing, religion)
George Moore Fairchild. Rod and canoe, rifle and snowshoe in Quebec's Adirondaks. 1896. (nature writing)
Ernest Thomas Seton. Wild Animals I have known. 1898.
W.A. Fraser. Mooswa and others of the boundaries. 1900.
Nellie McClung. Sowing Seeds in Danny. 1908. (Canadian prairie writing)
NellieMcLung. Purple Springs. 1908. (Canadian Prairie Writing)
Bertrand Sinclair. Burned Bridges. (Environment as redemptive force in life of disillusioned minister who has retreated from eastern cities)
W.H. Blake. Brown waters and other sketches. 1915.
Peter McArthur. In pastures green. 1915. (McArthur campaigs for a back-to-the-land movement. Simple life close to nature as social ideal, man happiest when farming)
Samuel Wood. Rambles of a Canadian naturalist. 1916.
A.D. Wood. Old days on the farm. 1918. (environment makes growing up in the country an enduring memory)
Peter McArthur. Friendly acres. 1921. (McArthur campaigs for a back-to-the-land movement. Simple life close to nature as social ideal, man happiest when farming. Concern for country juxtaposed with impending decay of US city life.)
C. Gordon Hewitt. The conservation of wildlife in Canada. 1921. (advocates destruction of 'vermin' on economic grounds)
W.H. Blake. In a fishing country. 1922.
Edwyn Sandys. Sportsman Joe. 1924. (since predators are scarce, hunters should assume predator role to promote preservation and increase of species)
Martha Ostenso. Wild Geese. 1925. (forerunner to Canaian realist novel - Canadian prairie environment a deterministic force?)
Frederick Philip Grove. Settlers of the Marsh. 1925. (realism - loss of innocence on Manitoba frontier)
RJC Stead. Grain. 1926. (Canadian Prairie writing, realism)
Peter Arthur. Friendly Acres. 1927. (McArthur campaigs for a back-to-the-land movement. Simple life close to nature as social ideal, man happiest when farming.)
Grey Owl. Pilgrims of the wild. 1934. (Grey Owl masquerades as an Amerindian to identify with the spirit of the wilderness)
Grey Owl. Tales of an empty cabin. 1936. (Grey Owl masquerades as Amerindian to identify with spirit of the wilderness)
Robert Haig-Brown. Return to the river. 1941. (first autobiogrpahy with roles for game management)
Robert Haig-Brown. A river never sleeps. 1946.
William Sherwood Fox. T'aint running no more: the story of Grand Bend, the Pinery, and the old river bed. 1946 (fishing on the Aux Sables River. recreates history of country world)
W.O. Mitchell. Who has seen the wind. 1947. (prairie writing. Mitchell's best-loved book. boy, his dog, and gophers. dark side of small town life)
Kenneth McNeil Wells. The owl pen. 1947. (misadventures of a beekeeper. ineptitude in farming as funny without social stigma - implies superiority of the urban)
Kenneth McNeil Wells. By Moonstone Creek. 1949. (misadventures of a beekeeper. ineptitude in farming as funny without social stigma - implies superiority of the urban)
Kenneth McNeil Wills. Up Mendote way. 1951. (misadventures of a beekeeper. ineptitude in farming as funny without social stigma - implies superiority of the urban)
Ernest Buckler. The Mountain and the Valley. 1952.
Farley Mowat. People of the Deer. 1952. (Mowat a conservationist, widely read. this book made him a literary celebrity, contributed to shift in govt. policy toward Inuit)
William Sherwood Fox. The Bruce Beckons: the story of Huron's great peninsula. 1952. (Fox's best-known book.)
Grant Madison. River for a sidewalk. 1953. (like Thoreau, tried to live life of self-reliance in a log house in mountains and forests of British Columbia)
Kenneth McNeil Wells. By Jumping Cat Bridge. 1956. (misadventures of a beekeeper. ineptitude in farming as funny without social stigma - implies superiority of the urban)
William Arthur Breyfogle. Speak to the earth. 1961. (need to recognize symbiotic kinship with natural processes)
Rudy Weibe. Peace Shall Destroy Many. 1962. (mennonites)
Farley Mowat. Never Cry Wolf. 1963. (credited with changing perceptions of canids. Mowat a conservationist and one of Canada's most widely-read authors)
Philip W. Keller. Splendour from the land. 1963. (farmer as an economic figure, farming as a machine-based occupation, values financial profits of agribusiness over pleasant life of agrarianism)
Margaret Laurence. The Stone Angel. 1964. (set on Manitoba prairie - economic hardship and climatic challenges of frontier life)
Andy Russell. Grozzly country. 1967.
Harold Horwood. The foxes of Beachy Cove. 1967.
Ernest Buckler. Ox bells and fireflies. 1968.
R.D. Lawrence. The poison makers. 1969. (environmental degradation caused by pesticides)
John Tetso. Trapping is my life. 1970.
R.D. Lawrence. Cry wild: the story of a Canadian timber-wolf. 1970.
Ruby Wiebe. The Temptations of Big Bear. 1973.(before second Riel Rebellion, Big Bear is the only prairie chief to keep up pressure for a better treaty by refusing to choose a reserve)
Maria Campbell. Half-Breed. 1973. (halfbreeds lose struggle w/Canadian Govt. to keep their land in 1860s, homestead in Saskatchewam)
Daryll Stweard. Canadian endangered species. 1974.
R.D. Lawrence. Wildlife in North America: birds. 1974.
R.D. Lawrence. Wildlife in North America: mammals. 1974.
Howard Adams. Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View. 1975. (autobiography /history, influences by Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, black power advocates at Berkeley)
shmael Reed. Flight to Canada. 1976. (US author - black American search for refuge in 19th and 20th C)
Joan Barfoot. Abra (later Gaining Ground). 1978. (woman leaves suburbia and her marriage and becomes a hermit)
Gilean Douglas. Silence is my homeland. 1978. (she finds spiritual sustenance in the wilderness)
Gilean Douglas. The protected place. 1979. (observations on nature as seen from her house on Cortes Island structured pastoral motif of annual cycle of seasons)
Christine Van Der Mark. In Due Season. 1979. (Canadian prairie writing)
Sky Lee. Disappearing Moon Cafe. 1990. (Asian Canadian lesbian. traces Chinese Canadian family as it struggles against poverty and racism in railroad camps and moves to Chinatown in Vancouver)
Austin Clarke Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack 1980 (Canadian writer from Barbados. nonfiction. deals w/Bristish education)
Aritha Van Herk. The Tent Peg. 1981. (young woman disguises self as man to work in a uranium prospecting camp in the Yukon mountains)
David Williams. The river horseman. 1981.
Joy Kogawa. Obasan. 1981. (autobiographical. schoolteacher remembers growing up as 3rd generation Japanese Canadian during WWII - Naomi reconciles herself to past and embraces/is embraced by Canadian landscape)
R.D. Lawrence. A zoo that never was. 1981. (rescuing wildlife in Ontario)
Hugh Brody. Maps and Dreams. 1981. (account of an 18-month journey through world of the Beaver Indians. retraces history of frontier exploration from 18th C to corporate energy dreams of the preset day. animals, wildlife, boomtowns, oil rigs, ranchers, hunters, white energy speculators)
Beatrice Culleton. In Search of April Raintree. 1983. (April and Cheryl Raintree are Métis who grow up in foster care in Winnipeg, Manitoba)
Geoffrey Ursell. Perdue. 1984.
R.D. Lawrence. In praise of wolves. 1986.
Mike Crammond. Of Bears and Men. 1986.
Michael Ondaatje. In the Skin of a Lion. 1987. (immigrants contribute to building Toronto in the early 1900s - attention to construction of Toronto landmarks including Prince Edward Viaduct and R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. transformation of landscape - logging, construction, dynamite)
Rudy Weibe. Playing dead: A contemplation concerning the Arctic. 1989.
Margaret Sweatman. Fox. 1991.
Wayne Grady. From the country: writings about rural Canada. 1991. (short stories about villagers and rural residents - depicts them as protagonists)
Chris Czajkowski. Cabin at Singer River. 1991. (about building a house in B.C. wilderness)
Peter Olivia. Drowning in Darkness. 1992.
Carol Shields. The stone diaries. 1993.
E Annie Proulx. The Shipping News. 1993. (Proulx born in Connecticuit to French Canadian parents. lives in Wyoming and spends part of the year in Newfoundland, setting of this novel - protagonist Quoyle is New York newspaperman whose father emigrated from Newfoundland and who returns to ancestral home of Quoyle's Point for a new beginning)
Thomas Wharton. Ice-Fields. 1993.
Thomas King. Green Grass, Running Water. 1993. (the escapes of four very old Indians Ishmael, Hawkeye, Robinson Crusie and Lone Ranger from a mental hospital has 37 times coincided with disasters. moves from Canada to Wounded Knee to Hillywood. deals w/tourism and conservation on Indian land. Tom King is Cherokee and Greek, born in CA, lives in Canada since 1980)
Wayne Grady. The nature of coyotes. 1994.
sharon Butala. The perfection of the morning: an apprenticeship in nature. 1994. (her struggle to feel at home on husband's farm)
Darlene Barry Quaife. Days and Nights on the Amazon. 1994.
Nicole Markotic. Yellow pages. 1995.
Marsha Boulton. Letters from the country. 1995. (Author's own rural life as a private/public entertainment)
Wayson Choy. The Jade Peony. 1995. (story of a family in Vancouver's Chinatown before and during WWII)
Chris Czajkowski. Diary of a wilderness dweller. 1996. (about building a house in B.C. wilderness)
R.D. Lawrence. A shriek in the night: wilderness encounters. 1996.
Janice Kulyk-Keefer. The Green LIbrary. 1996. (Ukranian writer writes about experience of first-generation Canadian children of immigrants)
Robert Kroetsch. Seed Catalogue. 1997. (horticultural model for thinking about Kroetsch's genesis as a prairie writer in a literary landscape dominated by fiction)
Lawrence Hill. Any Known Blood. 1997. (Langston Cane is the Canadian son of a black man and a white woman and one of five generations of Langston Canes - decides to investigate family lore that the first Langston Cane dies fighting alongside John Brown at Herpers Ferry)
Kerri Sakamoto. The Electrical Field. 1998. (Japanese Canadians struggle with lingering effects of WWII internment camps. neighborhood of bungalows bellow electrical towers)
Suzette Mayr. The Widows. 1998. (prairie writing. three elderly German immigrant women take a trip over Niagra falls in a bright orange space age barrel. influenced by feminist road narrative. like 1995 Moon Honey, also concerned with racism)
Warren Cariou. Lake of the Prairies. 2002. (memoir about growing up in meadow lake in Saskatchewan)
Hiromi Goto. The Kappe Child. 2002. (comparisson to Little House on the Prairie suggests Wilder's version a fantasy in contrast to harsh experience of narrator - the kappa, Japanese trickster figure, is transplanted onto Canadian prairie landscape)
Joan Crate
Austin Clarke. The Polished Hoe. 2003. (takes place on fictional W. Indian island of Bimshire. sugar plantation worker has just killed plantation manager)
Michael Ondaatje. Divisadero. 2007. (Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist. novel bout a single father with natural daughter Anna, adopted daughter Claire, and orphaned Cooper taken in at 4 yrs. to later work on the . Anna moves to France, Claire to SF and Coop gambles up and down West Coast)
Edward McCourt. The Canadian West in fiction. 1949.
James Doyle. North of America: Images of Canada in the Literature of the United States, 1775-1900. 1983.
John A. Murray. A republic of rivers: three centuries of nature writing from Alaska and the Yukon. 1990.
Alexander Wilson. The culture of nature: North American Landscape from Disney to Exxon Valdez. 1991. (environmental crisis ecological in nature - includes entire interconnected web of relationships between species, climate, topography, human intervention)
Wayne Grady, ed. Treasures of the place: three centuries of nature writing in Canada. 1992.
Andrea Lebowitz. Living in harmony: nature writing by women in Canada. 1996.
Alice Munro
Emma Lee Warrior
Thomas King
Jeanette Armstrong. Slash. 1985.
Jeanette Armstrong. The Woman Who Loved Airports. 1985.
I
Celia Ferrier
Nan Peacocke
Keisha Silvera
Janet Somerville
Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes
Jennifer Walcott
Louise Delisle
Andre Alexis
Shani Mootoo
Tamarack magazine 1960
Cyril Dabydeen (Canadian writer from Guyana, grew up on sugar plantation.)
Cyril Dabydeen. Coastland: New and Selected Poems. 1989.
Cyril Dabydeen. North of the Equator. 2001. (short stories)
Cyril Dabydeen. Berbice Crossing. 1996. (short storie)
Cyril Dabydeen. Drums of My Flesh. 2005. (diasporic account of a family as told by a Guyanese immigrant father to his Canadian daughter - juxtaposes landscape and family structures in Guyana and Canada)
Yasmin Ladha.
Margaret Atwood
Jan Shinebourne
E. Pauline Johnson.
Claire Harris
George Elliot Clarke
Harrichand Itwaru
Cecil Foster
Nalo Hopkinson
Louise Bennett
Wendy (Motion) Brathwaite
Afua Cooper
Ramabai Espinet
Honor Ford-Smith
Arnold Itwaru
Daay Laferriere
Tessa McWatt
Pamela Mordecai
Joel Des Rosiers
Olive senior
Makeda Silvera
Guillermo Verdecchia Fronteras Americanas
Glissant Faulkner, Mississippivd
Caroline Levander studies hemispheric dimension of US Lit Global Nations/Foreign Relations in the Americas
special issue of journal of Comparative American Studies devoted to Canada and the Americas, ed. Rachel Adams
Jose Martí
Herbert Bolton
Edmundo O'Gorman
Ralph Bauer - early Americas
Jicoténcal (1826)
Anna Brickhouse Transamerican Literary Relations and the Ninetheenth-Centiry Public Sphere
Caroline Field Levander Hemispheric American Studies
Amy Kaplan The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture
Sean X. Goudie Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic
removed from list:
Rosario Feré. Sweet Diamond Dust. 1996.
relevant texts on my other lists:
Mosquito Gayle Jones
Absalom, Absalom! WIlliam Faulkner
Call of the Wild Jack London
Arctic Dreams Barry Lopez