You Can't Get There From Here: The Past as Present in Small-Town Ontario Fiction - Hardcover

Porter, Ryan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1487504241 ISBN 13: 9781487504243

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Ryan Porter is Professor of Technical Communication at Algonquin College.

Review:

"Interesting and thoughtful, You Can’t Get There From Here offers a portrait of small-town Ontario. In essence, this book is the representation of the past through the eyes of the present, a seminal trope in Canadian literature, and worthy of full analysis as presented by Ryan Porter."

(David Staines, Department of English, University of Ottawa)

"Beyond sound, the scholarship is impressive. Wholly appropriate and often imaginative, Porter makes the range of his readings and references especially clear, seamlessly shifting from a primary text to its scholarly context and back again."

(Robert Thacker, Charles A. Dana Professor in the Departments of Canadian Studies and English, St Lawrence University)

"Eminently readable, informative, and interesting!"

(Coral Ann Howells, Professor Emerita, University of Reading; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London.)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1487504241
• ISBN 13: 9781487504243
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224