Overview
What is the connection between Oscar Wilde and the literary history of Canada? Where do we locate gender and sexuality in the performance of Canadian ethnicities? How might the sexual sloganeering of Queer Nation illuminate the cultural angst of Northrop Frye? Peter Dickinson explores these and other questions in this book, the first full-length study to consider how the interconnected concepts of nationalism and sexuality have helped shape the production and reception of Canadian, Québécois, and First Nations literatures.The main focus of Dickinson’s study is contemporary– the fiction, drama, and poetry of Timothy Findley, Michel Tremblay, Tomson Highway, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, and others. Juxtaposing an alternative sexual politics against the predominantly nationalist literary framework of literary criticism in Canada, he argues that the historical construction of Canada’s literatures around the apparent absence of a coherent national identity presupposes the presence of a subversive, destabilizing sexual identity. To Frye’s ‘Where is here?’ Dickinson answers emphatically, ‘Here is queer.’
Drawing on a wide and eclectic body of post-colonial, gay and lesbian, and Canadian literary scholarship, Here Is Queer extends in new and exciting ways our thinking about Canada’s ‘famous problem of identity.’ Dickinson brings to his work a familiarity and ease with contemporary queer theory and Canadian cultural criticism that will appeal to readers interested in issues of nationality, sexuality, politics, identity, and literature.