[Download] "Terror, Love, And the National Voyeur: Gilbert Parker's the Seats of the Mighty (Critical Essay)" by English Studies in Canada * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Terror, Love, And the National Voyeur: Gilbert Parker's the Seats of the Mighty (Critical Essay)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 238 KB
Description
One of the most popular Canadian novels of the late nineteenth century is one that many non-specialists today may not have even heard of, Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty (1896). The novel, which is set like many Canadian novels of the time during the "fall" of Quebec, received "instant international acclaim" (Ripley 9) and was the first of Parker's novels to be published in a Canadian edition, which eventually became a standard highschool text (Adams 85). A theatrical version of the novel was staged in 1897, attended by U.S. President Grover Cleveland at the Boston performance and put on in London, England, for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (Ripley 9). There are some good reasons why this particular novel was so well known among English speakers at the turn of the century and so significant for anglophone Canadians especially, although these reasons have yet to be fully explored. The few critics who have recently looked at the novel notice its racism in the way it pits British-Canadian morality against French decadence. (1) However, what I am particularly interested in here is that this decadence is not merely condemned and dismissed but reformulated in such a way that it can be controlled by anglophone Canadians. Francophones in the novel are both celebrated and disavowed through a complex process that involves an anxious surveillance to distinguish and categorize cultures that, on the surface of the skin, appear similar.