American and Canadian Literature and Culture: Across a Latitudinal Line _________________________________ Papers from the Saarbrücken Mediation Project PUBLICATIONS OF THE CENTRE FOR CANADIAN AND ANGLO-AMERICAN CULTURES Series Editor Klaus Martens Volume 1 — 2008 Klaus Martens, Paul Morris, eds. American and Canadian Literature and Culture: Across a Latitudinal Line Papers from the Saarbrücken Mediation Project PUBLICATIONS OF THE AMARANT PRESSE Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.ddb.de> abrufbar. © 2008 Nordamerikanische Literatur und Kultur Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures Amarant Presse Universität des Saarlandes Im Stadtwald Geb. C5 3 66041 Saarbrücken Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Mikroverfilmung, Einspeicherung in und Verarbeitung durch elektronische Systeme. Umschlag und Satz: Achim Loch Titelbild: Little McArthur Falls, Winnipeg River, © Mary Grove Printed in Germany 2008 ISBN 978-3-00-024566 Table of Contents Introduction ____________________________________________ 9 David Lucking Unsettling the Wilderness. The Interloping Pioneer in Atwood and Grove _______________ 13 Arlette Warken Frederick Philip Grove and Knut Hamsun: Northern European Perceptions of the New World____________ 28 Rosmarin Heidenreich FPG and André Gide: Life, Art and Rifacimento ______________ 40 Karin Beeler Japanese-Canadian Girl Meets Laura Ingalls: Re-Imagining the Canadian and American West(s) in Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child _________________________ 55 Gordon Bölling “You’re Not the Indian I Had in Mind”: Hollywood’s Appropriation of the Native Other in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy _______________ 70 Esther Fritsch Tossing the Tempest — American and Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest ___________________ 96 Norbert Lennartz “Canada mania” — The Fascination for Canada and Anti-Americanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature___ 118 Svante Lindberg Oslo by Bertrand Gervais: L’américanité as Repatriation _______ 134 Carl Spadoni Leacock, Davies, and Their American Publishers _____________ 151 Laurence Ricou Reading a Bioregion on Zero Avenue ______________________ 168 Ramin Djahazi The Autochthonous, the Primitive, and the Group of Seven__________________________________ 182 Colette Weihrauch True Colors: Comparing America’s The Eight and Canada’s Group of Seven _____________________________ 198 Achim Loch Modernist Music in the United States and Canada: Ornstein and Weinzweig ________________________________ 214 Notes on Contributors __________________________________ 228 Acknowledgments The editors gratefully acknowledge the Deutsche Forschungsgemein- schaft, Universität des Saarlandes and the Freunde der Universität des Saarlandes for financial support granted for the conferences at which the papers gathered here were presented. Thanks are also due the Cana- dian Comparative Literature Association for hosting the Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Literature and Culture presentations at the Winnipeg Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities (2004). Introduction The Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Literature and Culture’s sequence of small, intimate conferences dedicated to questions concerning the mediation of literature and culture was initiated in April 1998. The selected essays from this, as it turned out, groundbreaking Saarbrücken conference were published to considerable acclaim as Pioneering North America (2000). This initial volume explores transatlantic crosscurrents with a major emphasis placed on European influences on North American literature and culture. The second volume published in the mediation series is entitled The Canadian Alternative (2004). It contains papers from the eponymous 2002 Saarbrücken conference which concentrated on Canadian developments deserving of mediation in a European context. The present, third volume contains selected papers given at three further conferences. The first was presented by members of the CCAC and hosted by the Canadian Comparative Literature Association at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg (1 June 2004). The following conference was hosted by the CCAC at the Universität des Saarlandes (28-30 October 2004). The CCAC then hosted a small international symposium devoted to “Emerging Modernisms in Canada and the United States 1914-1941: A Comparative Approach” at the Universität des Saarlandes, which concluded the series (23 February 2006). The subject of the three mediation conferences included here was a cluster of themes related to the complex topic of modernism as a cultural period and a literary movement in Canada and the United States. Modernism in Canada and the United States was framed not only by different historical parameters but also assumed different cultural shapes in response to the separate social and literary forces at play in the two countries. The modernism of the United States, as exemplified by such epochal international events as the Armory Show of 1913, for example, signals a form of participation within an international movement which was slower to develop in Canada. The subsequent emergence in the United States of writers, critics and artists supportive of the broad cultural goals of modernism in poetry, fiction, drama and the visual arts attests to the success of the movement. 9 American and Canadian Literature and Culture: Across a Latitudinal Line In Canada, although the innovations of the Group of Seven may be compared to the earlier modernizing thrust of the Armory Show in painting, the success of modernism in launching itself as a broader based cultural trend was slower and more restricted than in the United States. In Canada, the establishment of a literary institution, gaining strength in the 1920s by the efforts of such writers as Frederick Philip Grove, A.L. Phelps and Watson Kirkconnell, among others, was closely related to the development of a national identity. They had tackled a vast cultural project which seems to have taken priority over the more closely defined aesthetic goals of modernism as a literary movement. Regions, populations, religions, national historical events, economic products, and the means of production had not yet been wholly explored in their Canadian contexts and meanings. It is perhaps for this reason as well that in Canada the tradition of modernist writing extended longer than in the United States. In fact, it was continued well into the post-WWII period, a time when American critics, writers, and literary institutions were forging an aesthetic and period concept of postmodernism. While papers from the two earlier conferences (2004) address particular authors and works, essays from the third (2006), also collected here, add the complex field of interlocking cultural and literary issues. The focus of the third conference was intended to foster an international exchange of research and critical opinion involving issues of literary history, gender studies, intermediality, transculturality, translation studies, poetry, and editing problems centred on, though not limited to, the crucial period between the wars. The papers collected treat issues related to the study of primary texts, but also to critical texts and related theoretical approaches dealing with the subject of modernism, as well as the interrelations between the social and artistic forces, including music and painting, which fostered or hindered the development of modernism. As a notable research centre for early twentieth-century North American and European literary and cultural history, the Saarbrücken CCAC, we believe, is ideally situated to provide the appropriate forum for scholarly investigation of topics as those presented in the following pages. We are grateful to all contributors to the conferences and to this volume for their trust and their dedicated work. The editors also wish 10 Introduction to thank members of the CCAC team for their varying degrees of involvement in this project. Ramin Djahazi participated in the final corrections and Achim Loch formatted the manuscript. The editors 11 Unsettling the Wilderness: The Interloping Pioneer in Atwood and Grove David Lucking In view of the prominence of the position occupied by Frederick Philip Grove in the landscape of Canadian literature, it is perhaps surprising that Margaret Atwood, in a book so centrally concerned with the topography of that landscape as her thematic study Survival, should devote as little space to his works as she does. In an essay written in 1973 in response to criticisms of her book she acknowledges that a number of authors of foreign provenance were wholly overlooked in her analysis, and also that she failed to “pay as much attention to Grove as some might like” (Atwood, Survival 142). She attributes this neglect not to any shortcomings on the part of the writers concerned but to her own misgivings as to whether it might not be “dangerous to talk about ‘Canadian’ patterns of sensibility in the work of people who entered and/or entered-and-left the country at a developmentally late stage of their lives” (142). Since it is only reasonable to assume that the perceptions of Grove and other foreign-born authors were shaped by experiences having nothing to do with life in Canada, Atwood is implying, it is