Polić, V.;
(2018)
The Hauntings of Canada in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland.
London Journal of Canadian Studies
, 33
(6)
pp. 77-93.
10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.006..
Preview |
Text
Article6.pdf Download (602kB) | Preview |
Abstract
In Michael Crummey’s novel Sweetland (2014), which belongs to the genre of Canadian Gothic, ghosts function as warnings and reminders on a broader cultural and national level. The article analyzes different kinds of hauntings in the novel to show how they emphasize the notions of belonging to a local community and specific location, to alert to the disappearance of the traditional ways of life and the importance of cultural memory for the survival of a comprehensive and diversified Canadian identity. The hauntings include: ‘typical’ ghosts haunting individual characters; workings of capital and national consolidation, which are shown haunting the local community (serving as a synecdoche of the Newfoundland region); hauntings of disappeared local communities in the impersonal national construct of Canadian culture (cultural mosaic); hauntings which emphasize notions of belonging to and emplacement into Canada’s Atlantic region; the haunting of the unrecordable quality of lived experience in such a community; and the inevitability of the book to be a record of absence as well as warning of that absence. The article discusses and postulates hauntings as a strategy of resistance against historical amnesia, but also as testaments to belonging.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Hauntings of Canada in Michael Crummey’s Sweetland |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.006. |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.006. |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2018, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited |
| Keywords: | Michael Crummey, Sweetland, Canadian Gothic, haunting, ghosts, belonging, cultural haunting, historical erasure, storied pasts, capital |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10063235 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
