Book Description

Americans have an idea of what the Great Plains did to the people who settled there but know little about the analogous process north of the 49th parallel, or how it was reflected in fiction. Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country fills this gap. Harrison traces the varying literary responses to the Canadian prairies, from the bewilderment of the first English-speaking visitors, who saw the country in essentially negative terms -- no wood, no water -- down to the contemporary novelists who are employing sophisticated modem fictional techniques to reinterpret the whole experience from a new perspective. Between these two ends of the literary continuum he finds the early writers of fiction too loaded down with what he calls "excess cultural baggage" brought from Britain or eastern Canada to see the country as it was; the early twentieth-century writers, bemused by the myth of the garden, who portrayed the prairies subdued and fruitful; the prairie realists of the 1920s and 1930s, akin to O. E. Rolvaag in their tragic view; and their contemporaries, the popular novelists, who depicted the pioneering process in more affirmative tones.