Author : Ryan Porter
Release : 2019-04-08
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 753/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis You Can’t Get There From Here by : Ryan Porter

Download or read book You Can’t Get There From Here written by Ryan Porter. This book was released on 2019-04-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than reading small-town representations in Canadian literature as portraits of a parochial past or a lost golden age, this book claims that they are best understood as sophisticated statements on the effects of modernity in an ever-more cosmopolitan world. In Ontario, as urbanization increased over the past century, small towns became a popular literary trope, and Ryan Porter argues that literary small towns are reflections, and even sublimated explorations, of contemporary life. Referencing the theories of heritage scholars, who view popularly understood pasts as constructions shaped by changing sensibilities, You Can’t Get There from Here argues that the literary small-town Ontario past is malleable, consisting of attempts to come to terms with the present in which the narrators find themselves. The book focuses on four key Ontario authors – Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart – as well as many secondary authors, and links the readings to much broader trends in actual Ontario towns and in popular culture.