Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization

Kit Dobson

Aug 2009 · Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

About this eBook

Transnational Canadas marks the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between globalization and Canadian literature written in English. Tracking developments in the literature and its study from the centennial period to the present, it shows how current work in transnational studies can provide new insights for researchers and students.

Arguing first that the dichotomy of Canadian nationalism and globalization is no longer valid in today’s economic climate, Transnational Canadas explores the legacy of leftist nationalism in Canadian literature. It examines the interventions of multicultural writing in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating the cultural politics of the period and how they increasingly became part of Canada’s state structure. Under globalization, the book concludes, we need to understand new forms of subjectivity and mobility as sites for cultural politics and look beyond received notions of belonging and being.

An original contribution to the study of Canadian literature, Transnational Canadas seeks to invigorate discussion by challenging students and researchers to understand the national and the global simultaneously, to look at the politics of identity beyond the rubric of multiculturalism, and to rethink the slippery notion of the political for the contemporary era.

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About the author

Kit Dobson is a faculty member in the English Department of Calgary’s Mount Royal College. He studied at the Universities of Victoria, York (UK), and Toronto, and has published in periodicals such as Studies in Canadian Literature, Open Letter, Callaloo, and English Studies in Canada. Transnational Canadas is his first book-length work.